With the East Oregon Film Festival underway this weekend in La Grande, Oregon, Filmmaker is happy to once again host the festival online selections here at the site. Starting now, for 48 hours, you can watch Monica Peña’s haunting and haunted relationship mystery, Hearts of Palm, preceded by a short, Frank Mosley’s multi-layered psychological drama Spider Veins. From the filmmakers, here are their two short synopses: Spider Veins: Two women reunite in a quiet neighborhood before a party begins. But by turns mysterious and shocking, the film’s narrative begins to unravel even as the women’s relationship teeters on the edge of […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 21, 2016Writer/director Monica Peña obliterates the notion of sophomore slump with her second independently produced feature film, Hearts of Palm, which will have its world premiere at Miami Dade College’s Miami International Film Festival tonight. With this movie, the Miami-based Cuban-American filmmaker has only advanced her avant-garde exploration of film narrative, which she first introduced us to with Ectotherms in 2014. Whereas her first film examined the lives of four Miami youths trapped in suburban anomie, her latest takes on a more personal subject: love turned sour. Both films are strongly rooted in Miami. The first contains allusions to the plight […]
by Hans Morgenstern on Mar 9, 2016