New Directors/New Films and Film Comment Selects 2013

Sharon Plumb: TOWHEADS (2012)

A harried Brooklyn housewife with two cute little blond boys resorts to a series of comic stunts to express her creativity. Plumb uses her own boys Walker and Cody and her husband (whose face is not seen) Derek Cianfrance as the dad. Cianfrance directed the Ryan Gosling, Michelle Williams film BLUE VALENTINE. Plumb is a video artist and her story is partly a woman's rights cry but there is no sense of real-life issues or real material hardships here and though pleasant and watchable up to a point, at nearly ninety minutes this film seems pushed.

Libbie D. Cohn, J.P. Sniadecki: PEOPLE'S PARK (2012)

Another documentary with a special use of POV and camera placement from the Harvard ethnography lab headed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor that produeced also SWEETGRASS, FOREIGN PARTS, and LEVIATHAN. This one like RUSSIA ARK done in a single long smooth tracking shot take, roves through a big Chinese park on a Saturday in July when it is full of people dancing, singing, picnicking, drinking tea, or just dozing or walking around. A Steady-Cam in the hands of one filmmaker who sat in a wheelchair pushed around by the other. Intense crowd sounds are an important part of the effect. This is probably the least impressive of the four, and you get the idea long before the 78 minutes have gone by, but both the film and the park are better looking than I had expected and the long tracking shot has a way of feeling soothing and hypnotic, whatever its content.

Lybov Arkus: ANTON'S RIGHT HERE (2012)

Editor and writer Arkus became so involved with the severely austistic teenager Anton that she later "kidnapped" him from a horrific mental institution and arranged for his home care after his mother's death from cancer. Her passionate two-hour documentary about the boy and this process is fascinating if a little less informative and more self-absorbed than it might ideally have been.

Shane Carruth: UPSTREAM COLOR (2013)

"Upstream Color certainly is something to see," wrote McCarthy, "if you're into brilliant technique, expressive editing, oblique storytelling, obscuritanist speculative fiction or discovering a significant new actress" (he refers to the female lead Amy Seimetz). Justin Chang of Variety noted it's "a warmer, less foreboding picture than Primer, not moving in any conventional sense, but suffused with emotion all the same." I say:

If you are into film as art I would consider this one of the year's musts so far, and it should become in some form available to everyone, even with limited theatrical release.

Think Terrance Malick meets David Lynch.

Sarah Polley: STORIES WE TELL (2012)

Accomplished Canadian actress Sarah Polley, whose feature debut got Julie Christie an Oscar nomination, turns successfully to documentary with a portrait of her extended family, with special focus on the discovery that her biological father wasn't her wild mom's husband and how everybody came peacefully to terms with this.

Leonardo di Constanzo: L'INTERVALLO (2012)

Di Constanzo's quiet little film in Neapolitan dialect shows two teenagers whose lives are already under the shadow of La Camorra. One is a girl who made the mistake of getting involved with a man from the rival clan. The other is a boy who runs an ice cream cart, who's sent to guard the girl for a day of punitive detention in a large abandoned building. Eventually they bond. Scripted with Mariangela Barbarnente (Orchestra of Piazza Virtorio) and Maurizio Braucci (Gomorrah and Reality). The young actors, Alessio Riso and Francesca Riso, are fresh discoveries. The film was in the Orizzonti series at the Venice Film Festival and won a raft of awards there.

Eryk Rocha: JARDS (2012)

This introduces someone you may not have heard of, Jards Jacaré, a superb Brazilian singer-songwriter dating from the Seventies like Gaetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, shown here making a new album in 2011. One could have done without the arty visual approach (extreme closups and no shots of hands or instruments) and the blurry archival Super8 material, but the recorded sound quality, at least, is fine.

Penny Lane: OUR NIXON (2012)

The filmmakers obtained good copies of many hours of Super 8 footage John Haldeman, Bob Erlichman, and Dwight Chapin, Nixon's closest aides, shot at the White House and have woven them into a short history of the Nixon Presidency's rise and fall, woven together with archival TV news and interviews. But do not expect anything new or different. The claim of providing "an unprecedented, insider's view" with this conventional, bright-colored footage is titillating, but quite spurious. Even here the Super 8 is used only as wallpaper for the Nixon for Dummies film. The promise no doubt justifies presenting this as the New Directors/New Films Closing Night presentation, though. It could sell extra tickets and draw a good festival crowd for the March 31 finale.

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A reminder that the actual public screenings of the 2013 edition of MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center's NEW DIRECTORS/NEW FILMS series begins today, Wednesday, March 20, and continues through March 31. Click on the logo above for the FSLC's full program, schedule, ticket purchase.

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OPENS TONIGHT! Explore this year's cinematic discoveries at the 42nd edition of New Directors/New Films, kicking off this evening with the remarkable BLUE CAPRICE. Hailed by The Hollywood Reporter as "a riveting first feature of startling maturity and intelligence," this chilling examination of gun violence features masterful performances from Isaiah Washington and Tequan Richmond. Director Alexandre Moors and cast in-person. A limited number of tickets available. Buy now

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FILMLEAF'S Festival Coverage Thread for the 2013 New Directors/New Films series begins HERE.

Index of Filmleaf reviews of ND/NF 2013

BLUE CAPRICE (Alexandre Moors 2012)
OUR NIXON (Penny Lane 2013)
THE ACT OF KILLING (Joshua Oppenheimer 2012)
ANTON’S RIGHT HERE (Lyubov Arkus 2012)
BURN IT UP DJASSA (Lonesome Solo 2012)
LES COQUILLETTES (Sophie Letourneur 2012)
THE COLOR OF THE CHAMELEON (Emil Christov 2012)
DIE WELT (Alex Pitstra 2012)
EMPEROR VISITS THE HELL (Li Luo 2013)
A HIJACKING (Tobias Lindholm2012)
JARDS (Eryk Rocha 2012)
JISEUL (O Muel 2012) 109min
KÜF (Ali Aydin 2012)
LEONES (Jazmin Lopez 2012)
L’INTERVALLO (Leonardo Di Costanzo 2012)
PEOPLE’S PARK (Libbie D. Cohn & J.P. Sniadecki 2012)
RENGAINE (Rachid Djaïdani 2012)
THE SHINE OF DAY (Tizza Covi & Rainer Frimmel 2012)
SOLDATE JEANNETTE (Daniel Hoesl 2012)
STORIES WE TELL (Sarah Polley 2012)
THEY’LL COME BACK (Marcelo Lordello 2012)
TOWER (Kazik Radwanski 2012)
TOWHEADS (Shannon Plumb 2013)
UPSTREAM COLOR (Shane Carruth 2012)
VIOLA (Matías Piñeiro 2013

Roundup

The New Directors/New Films series is a very large and varied collection. You have highly polished feature films like Danish director Tobias Lindholm's A Highjacking or the young American Shane Carruth's Upstream Color. Alexandre Moors may be more of an emerging artist, but Blue Caprice also is a fully realized work. So is Brazillian Marcelo Lordello's thought-provoking They'll Come Back. Others, like the African Lonesome Solo's Burn It Up Djassa, Rachid Djaïdani's Rengaine, or Alex Pitstra's Die Welt, are all (despite Rengaine's being made in Paris) in one way or another Third World efforts, working against odds of preparation and funding, bursting with talent and eagerness. Ali Aydin's Küf and Leonardo di Costanzo's L'Intervallo are both polished efforts, but somehow by design marginal and low keyed. Aydin sits at the feet of his countryman Nuri Bilge Ceylan, and probably of the Romanians too. Di Costanzo may suffer from Italy's current cinematic anemia and exhaustion. But both are good films. Sarah Polley's family documentary Stories We Tell hardly seems to need a boost. She's famous, and it's a very successful film. But it's her first documentary. Other inclusions seem doubtful, but not all in a series can be big successes. Our Nixon promises more than it performs if Penny Lane really thinks the archival footage by Nixon's three closest aides shows anything new. Eryk Rocha's Jards is in some ways sloppily done, but I'm happy to learn about this Brazilian musician. People's Park is another example of the Harvard ethnography documentary filmmaking, which is sometimes more exhausting than enlightening. I couldn't remember what The Color of a Chameleon and Viola were: that tells you something. Towheads has the distinction of being the most hated film of the series. I hated The Act of Killing and think somehow its documentary trickery is in bad taste. Les Coquillettes, Soldate Jeanette, Anton's Right Here and Jiseul are films you can have fun debating. Les Coquillettes is so silly and frivolous. But it's successful: it works. Soldate Jeannette doesn't quite work. It fizzles out. Yet it's so elegant and sure of itself at first, it stays with you. I discussed Jiseul with someone who loved it just for its atmosphere and gorgeous photography. I may have convinced her that O Muel doesn't know how to tell a story and that for events that are important and have been hidden for years straightforward storytelling is essential. She and I also differed on the very biased documentary about the Russian boy with severe Alzheimer's, Anton's Right Here. The issue is whether the bias spoils it, as some think. I decided it definitely does. My colleague was moved and thought it worked. Both of us will remember it.

The following are three ND/NF titles the Film Society of Lincoln Center is particularly hyping today, March 20, as the series' public screenings begin (and they are good). After are other choices of mine (with my descriptions).

Alexandre Moors : BLUE CAPRICE. Hailed by The Hollywood Reporter as "a riveting first feature of startling maturity and intelligence," this chilling examination of gun violence features masterful performances from Isaiah Washington and Tequan Richmond [as the Beltway sniper killers]. Director Alexandre Moors and cast in-person. A limited number of tickets available.

Ali Aydin : KÜF (Mar 21, 23): Venice Film Festival Award-Winner. This spellbinding character study centers on a railroad inspector and the 18-year search for his missing son.

Rachid Djaïdani: RENGAINE (Mar 22, 24): Celebrated by The Hollywood Reporter as "bursting with bravado and brio," this urban contemporary Romeo and Juliet is set in Paris.

Other titles I'd personally particularly recommend (and my description)-- with links to my Festival Coverage reviews:

Tobias Lindholm: A Hijacking (2012)--ND/NF
A suspenseful, realistic Danish drama about bargaining with Somali pilates for the freedom of a freighter crew.

Marcelo Lordello: They'll Come Back (2012)--ND/NF
Though-provoking Brazilian (Recife) tale of upper class kids dumped on a country road and what the younger girl learns about class and life.

Alex Pitstra: Die Welt (2012--ND/NF
An inventive young Dutch-Tunisian filmmaker's rueful re-imagining of how his father's emigration to Europe might have been had it happened now at the time of the "Jasmine" revolt.

Shane Carruth: Upstream Color (2013)--ND/NF
Long awaited second film from the brilliant, puzzle-weaving filmmaker of PRIMER. Think Kubrick, Lynch, Malik.

Sarah Polley: Stories We Tell (2012)--ND/NF
Canadian actress-filmmaker turns to documentary with an engaging story of her own family and her own paternity -- and the alternate versions and coverups of family secrets.

Leonardo Di Constanzo: L'Intervallo (2012)--ND/NF
A quiet, crabwise look at the pervasive power of the La Camorra crime clan network in the world of Naples from the viewpoint of two teenagers caught in its net, screenplay co-authored by the writer of Garrone's REALITY and GOMORRAH.

These are my picks. Go see them or if you can't, keep an eye out for them elsewhere. These are nine great new films by exciting directors you probably never heard of in most cases. And that's what New Directors is all about. (You've heard of Sarah Polley, but you don't know her as the director of a documentary.)

Note on Upstream Color from New York publicist agent Emilie Siegel:

*An additional screening of UPSTREAM COLOR has been added on Monday, April 1 (details below)


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UPSTREAM COLOR
(Shane Carruth)

Opens in New York on Friday, April 5
Expands to Top 25 Markets By April 19;
More Cities to Follow in Late April/Early May

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PIXOTE (HECTOR BABENCO 1980)

ND/NF Archive index

The FSLC blog provides today an archival index by year of the lineups of every New Directors/New Films series since they began in 1972:

"After we published a brief overview of the four decade history of New Director/New Films festival, we got a lot of requests for a full archive of past ND/NF lineups. Since we aim to please, here is a list of every feature that has been screened at ND/NF since its inception in 1972. Enjoy!" Actually they might better say "Drool!

For the archive/index go here.

Discoveries include: LA SALAMANDRE (Alain Tanner), THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS (Steven Spielberg), PIXOTE (Hector Babenco), WILD STYLE (Charlie Ahearn), TAMPOPO (Juzo Itami), SLACKER (Richard Linklater), CLERKS (Kevin Smith), WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE (Todd Solodnz), RUN LOLA RUN (Tom Tykwer), REAL WOMEN HAVE CURVES (Patricia Cardozo), HALF NELSON (Ryan Fleck), THE COVE (Louie Psihoyos), THE BLACK POWER MIXTAPE 1967-1975 (Göran Hugo Olsson, 2011).

I've only done them recently. I do think maybe the last three were better than this year's and to prove it here they are:

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39th New Directors/New Films (2010)

3 Backyards (Eric Mendelsohn, 2010)
Amer (Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, 2009)
Beautiful Darling (James Rasin, 2010)
Bilal’s Stand (Sultan Sharrief, 2009)
Bill Cunningham New York (Richard Press, 2010)
Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2009)
Down Terrace (Ben Wheatley, 2009)
Evening Dress (Myriam Aziza, 2009)
Every Day is a Holiday (Dima El-Horr, 2009)
The Father of My Children (Mia Hansen-Love, 2009)
Frontier Blues (Babak Jalali, 2009)
The Happiest Girl in the World (Radu Jude, 2009)
How I Ended This Summer (Alexei Popogrebsky, 2010)
Hunting & Sons (Sander Burger, 2010)
I Am Love (Kuca Guadagnino, 2009)
I Killed My Mother (Xavier Dolan, 2009)
La Pivellina (Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel, 2009)
The Last Train Home (Lixin Fan, 2009)
The Man Next Door (Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat, 2009)
My Perestroika (Robin Hessman, 2010)
Night Catches Us (Tanya Hamilton, 2010)
Northless (Rigoberto Perezcano, 2009)
The Oath (Laura Poitras, 2010)
The Red Chapel (Mads Brügger, 2009)
Samson and Delilah (Warwick Thornton, 2009)
Tehroun (Nader T. Homayoun, 2009)
Women Without Men (Shirin Neshat, 2009)

40th New Directors/New Films (2011)

678 (Mohamed Diab, 2010)
At Ellen’s Age (Pia Marais, 2010)
Attenberg (Athina Rachel Tsangari, 2010)
Belle Epine (Rebecca Zlotowski, 2010)
The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 (Göran Hugo Olsson, 2011)
Circumstance (Maryam Keshavarz, 2011)
Copacabana (Marc Fitoussi, 2010)
Curling (Denis Côté, 2010)
The Destiny of Lesser Animals (Deron Albright, 2011)
El Velador (Natalia Almada, 2011)
Gromozeka (Vladimir Kott, 2010)
Happy, Happy (Anne Sewitsky, 2010)
Hit So Hard (P. David Ebersole, 2011)
Hospitalité (Koji Fukada, 2010)
Incendies (Denis Villenueve, 2010)
Majority (Seren Yüce, 2010)
Man Without a Cell Phone (Sameh Zoabi, 2010)
Margin Call (JC Chandor, 2011)
Memory Lane (Mikhaël Hers, 2010)
Microphone (Ahmad Abdalla, 2010)
Octubre (Daniel and Diego Vega, 2010)
Outbound (Bogdan George Apetri, 2010)
Pariah (Dee Rees, 2011)
Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure (Matthew Bate, 2011)
Some Days are Better Than Others (Matt McCormick, 2010)
Summer of Goliath (Nicolás Pereda, 2010)
Tyrannosaur (Paddy Considine, 2010)
Winter Vacation (Li Hongqi, 2010)


The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 (Göran Hugo Olsson, 2011). Photo: LOUVERTURE FILMS / THE KOBAL COLLECTION

41st New Directors/New Films (2012)

5 Broken Cameras (Emad Burnat, Guy Davidi, 2011)
The Ambassador (Mads Brügger, 2011)
An Oversimplification of Her Beauty (Terence Nance, 2011)
Beasts of the Southern Wild (Benh Zeitlin, 2012)
Breathing (Karl Markovics, 2011)
Crulic: The Path to Beyond (Anca Damian, 2011)
Donoma (Djinn Carrénard, 2011)
Fear and Desire (Stanley Kubrick, 1953)
Found Memories (Julia Murat, 2011)
Generation P (Victor Ginzburg, 2011)
Gimme the Loot (Adam Leon, 2012)
Goodbye (Mohammad Rasoulof, 2011)
Hemel (Sacha Polak, 2012)
How to Survive a Plague (David France, 2012)
Huan Huan (Song Chuan, 2011)
It Looks Pretty from a Distance (Anka and Wilhelm Sasnal, 2011)
Las Acacias (Pablo Giorgelli, 2011)
The Minister (Pierre Schöller, 2011)
Neighboring Sounds (Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2012)
Now, Forager (Jason Cortlund and Julia Halperin, 2012)
Omar Killed Me (Roschdy Zem, 2011)
Oslo, August 31st (Joachim Trier, 2011)
Porfirio (Alejandro Landes, 2011)
The Rabbi’s Cat (Joann Sfar, Antoine Delesvaux, 2011)
The Raid: Redemption (Gareth Huw Evans, 2011)
Romance Joe (Lee Kwang-kuk, 2011)
Teddy Bear (Mads Matthiesen, 2012)
Twilight Portrait (Angelina Nikonova, 2011)
Where Do We Go Now? (Nadine Labaki, 2010)

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If Upstream Color ends up in many Top 10 lists at year's end, it would confirm my impression that this is the most over-rated film in recent years. Ok, let's be diplomatic shall we: there is no other contemporary movie I find less worthy of praise relative to the opinion of the majority of critics. I watched it with 2 friends who are 27 and 32 years old, a filmmaker/archivist and a film professor, and both found the film mannerist, shallow, and juvenile. The frenetic pace of the film (we estimated average shot length (ASL) at bet. 1 to 2 seconds) hides a dearth of ideas or feelings of any substance or consequence. I can see how UC works as a puzzler for some people and probably also as a kind of audiovisual sensation machine but it didn't work for me even within those narrow confines.

I take your point that all younger, informed viewers (they're not a uniform block, after all) do not praise Shane Carruth's long awaited UPSTREAM COLOR and your disliking it should not be taken as a sign of your age. I shouldn't have implied that, or even hint at it as a possibility, if I seemed to. Artists don't get "old" and good critics don't either.

Adjectives like "mannerist, shallow, and juvenile" have little value, however -- I've said this many times before -- without arguments and examples to explain what one means by them in any particular instance. What's needed from you here then, therefore, is a review, not just a reaction, however that reaction may have been shared with putatively well informed younger viewers. I should think you particularly as a film teacher would be aware that intelligent discourse is not a matter of emoting or tossing out adjectives but of information, illustration, and reasoned argument. Our former contributor arsaib used to say, very wisely and helpfully I think, that what mattered here wasn't evaluations of films but the reasons given for making them. This should be obvious if this is to remain the intelligent, informed film review and discussion site it has always sought to be, often with your strong support. I'd want to know rather what you or your screening comrades thought of PRIMER, if you've thought about his earlier film and how you relate it to this one. That would be interesting, and would carry more weight, even if it were still negative.

You may be right. I may be wrong. That's why I'd like to hear what you really have to say. Or the truth, as so often is the case and then is so much more interesting, may be somewhere in between.

As I said earlier in more than one post, I don't write reviews, not anymore. I write comments and I will continue to write them. It's your choice whether to respond to them or not. I promise to stop posting if no one responds to my posts.

Well, I got you to write something, anyway. But why not write reviews? Too busy teaching film to write about film for us anymore? What a shame. 25 words don't take long to write, and can constitute a pretty decent review, if well worded. As I said or meant to say, this is a film that needs watching more than once, you often watch films more than once and revise your opinion, and I hope you'll do that for UPSREAM COLOR.

It's a film I wrote about favorably on this site in the New Directors series. Variety and Hollywood Reporter had good things to say about it. Almost everybody did -- but that's why you say it's the Most Overrated. Well. We'll see. Metacritic 80, and the lowest score, the worst review, is rated at a 60. Mike D'Angelo on the Chicago Music Box Theater site (expanded from an earlier review):

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You’re Going To Want To
See It More Than Once:
UPSTREAM COLOR By Mike D’Angelo

Nine years ago, an obscenely talented, entirely self-taught filmmaker named shane Carruth made a
cautionary tale called PRIMER, about two engineers who accidentally build a time machine in their
garage. It turned out to be more cautionary than he probably anticipated. Carruth practically shot
the movie in his own garage, on a budget of roughly $7000; it won the grand prize at that year’s
sundance Film Festival, landed a distribution deal, was hailed as a masterpiece of lo-fi sci-fi. For all
its self-evident brilliance, however, PRIMER is a tad impenetrable. Few saw it during its theatrical run,
and those who did often went back multiple times—partly for the sheer pleasure of the experience,
but also in an attempt to work out the precise mechanics of its recursive narrative. Carruth then
spent years struggling in vain to secure financing for an even more ambitious follow-up. It’s not hard
to imagine him identifying with the character he played in his first picture, running himself ragged
trying to capitalize on his astonishing good fortune.

UPstREAM COLOR is Carruth’s second feature. here at last. It’s not the insane project he spent the
last decade pursuing, but you wouldn’t necessarily guess that from watching it. Perhaps no movie you
see this year will excite so much discussion. And while it’s recognizably Carruth’s work—particularly in
its unfashionable emphasis on montage, deriving meaning primarily from the way each brief, precise
shot relates to those before and after—it’s also a dramatic gear-shift from chilly and intellectual to
intuitive and sensual. Indeed, while uPstREAM CoLoR has a fair amount of (purely functional)
dialogue, it’s essentially a silent film, obsessed not just with color but with texture and movement
and rhythm. you’ll want to turn off the decoder ring, if you can manage it, and just allow yourself to
luxuriate in its associative grandeur.

Still, let’s not pretend this is an easy film to grasp—though it’s knotty in a very different way from
PRIMER. What happens isn’t in question this time; what to make of what happens is the tricky
part. here’s what’s certain: We meet a woman, Kris (Amy seimetz), who appears to be an upscale
professional working with special effects in some capacity. she’s drugged, hypnotized, and robbed
of everything she owns. unable to recall or comprehend what’s happened to her, she falls into
a codependent relationship with Jeff (Carruth), a man she meets on a train, who seems to have
undergone the same traumatic experience. Both, meanwhile, have been “sampled” by a strange man
(Andrew sensenig) who has surgically transferred their essence—and while I’ve been working very
hard to obscure the bizarre details up to this point, I can’t keep it up any longer—into some pigs.
henry David thoreau’s Walden plays a key role in the story, as does a grub that inhabits the dirt
underneath certain orchids. Also, pigs. Did I mention pigs?

Trying to make literal sense of this baldly metaphorical picture can be fun but isn’t strictly
necessary—it’s meant to work on a more primal level, bypassing the logic circuits. Visual and aural
rhymes are constant and richly suggestive. Judging from the two films he’s made so far, Carruth
seems particularly interested in destructive feedback loops; one memorable interlude in uPstREAM
CoLoR (there are few conventional “scenes”) finds Kris and Jeff heatedly arguing about whether
certain childhood memories are his or hers. the film is a study of damaged people in which both
the damage and the method of recovery has been made productively strange, allowing Carruth to
reclaim some potent ideas that have become clichés. It’s also a dazzling exercise in pure form, with
a cinematic syntax that’s confident and exacting yet still feels wildly spontaneous—part Kubrick,
part Malick. And it provides seimetz (who’s a filmmaker herself) with a role that in many ways defies
traditional acting, but which she nonetheless makes defiantly vivid.

The most exciting aspect of Carruth’s movies, though, in the end, may be the immense respect they
afford the viewer. Not only does he refuse to spoon-feed, in the tiresome manner of most hollywood
fare (and even a sizable percentage of indie films), but he continually credits you with the intelligence
to infer cause from effect, presenting you with B and trusting that you’ll work out A, which remains
firmly offscreen, on your own. “you can step off the tile,” the thief (thiago Martins) tells a catatonic
Kris at the outset of her ordeal, as her toes hover nervously in mid-air. “the rest of the floor will
support your weight now.” Rather than show us Kris being hypnotized into immobility, as almost any
other filmmaker would do for clarity’s sake, Carruth cuts directly to her release—which is every bit as
clear and far more arresting. And this moment, too, feels vaguely autobiographical. that such a gifted
artist has at long last sprung himself from the imaginary prison of development hell should make film
buffs everywhere let out a mighty cheer.

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http://www.musicboxtheatre.com/asset...INAL-LoRes.pdf

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Playing back to back at Roxie Theater, Amy Seimetz's directorial debut Sun Don't Shine and Shane Carruth's Upstream Color!
--press release from San Francisco Film Society 16 May 2013.

In this wondrously accomplished and furiously expressive drama [Sun Don't Shine] blending the moody rambles of a road movie with the tightly ratcheted criminal tension of a film noir the director Amy Seimetz (Upstream Color), in her first feature, captures the wildly flailing energy and exhausted torpor of grinding frustration as well as the flickering grace of stifled dreams. Her protagonists, Crystal (Kate Lyn Sheil) and Leo (Kentucker Audley), are classic young lovers on the run, driving through rural Florida with a body in the trunk of their car, but violence, fear, and distrust poison their romance from the movie's very start, and things only get worse as they head toward St. Petersburg, where Leo hopes to get help from a former girlfriend (Kit Gwin). - Richard Brody, The New Yorker. For details and tickets, visit roxie.com.

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