Lena Dunham’s SXSW Emerging Visions entry Creative Nonfiction is exactly that — an Emerging Vision. It’s the early and somewhat unformed work of a clearly ambitious artist (22 year-old Dunham wrote, directed and stars in a dual role in the film, which was shot on video and 16mm over the course of several years, beginning when she was a junior at Oberlin College and making extensive use of that school’s dorm rooms as sets) who seems to know what she wants to say, which is something of a feat in itself. If she doesn’t quite manage to actually say it in this, her first feature, if her enthusiasm for the language and possibilities of cinematic comedy seem to outweigh her grasp of tools and technique, she proves herself as someone to watch, as a conceptual artist and as a comedienne.
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The lineup for the 2009 SXSW Film Festival is now out, and pasted in full after the jump. First skim highlights:
- Andrew Bujalski’s Beeswax, which will world premiere in a matter of days in Berlin.
- Sorry, Thanks, directed by Dia Sokol (producer of Mutual Appreciation and Nights and Weekends), and starring Wiley Wiggins and Bujalski.
- New features by both Joe Swanberg (Alexander the Last, starring Jess Weixler, Justin Rice and Barlow Jacobs) and Kris Swanberg (It Was Great, But I Was Ready To Come Home, screening in Narrative Competition).
- Objectified, a new documentary by Helvetica director Gary Hustwit.
- True Adolescents, about an “Aging indie rocker” who “takes two teen boys on an ill-fated hiking trip.” Starring Mark Duplass and Melissa Leo.
- Creative Nonfiction, a narrative feature by Lena Dunham starring Eleonore Hendricks (The Pleasure of Being Robbed).
- St. Nick, directed by David Lowery, who reviewed Robbed for us at SXSW last year.
- Some of our favorite films from Sundance 2009, including Moon, Humpday, and You Won’t Miss Me.
- Toronto favorites Goodbye Solo, The Hurt Locker and Three Blind Mice.
- Early contender for Best Title & Synopsis, Sight Unseen: Make Out With Violence, described as “A rock musical wherein the living love the dead and break into silence instead of song.”
I’ll be at SXSW once again this year, so if there’s anything on the lineup you’re particularly looking forward to that you’d like to see coverage of, let me know if the comments.
We’ll also be doing pre-SXSW coverage again this year, so if you’re a filmmaker showing work at SXSW this year, and you’d be interested in being featured in one of our SXSW previews and/or can send us a screener, do get in touch by sending an email to karina AT spout DOT com. If you can send us a screener before the festival, you definitely improve your chance of getting covered. If you do send a screener and we don’t like the movie, we won’t write about it at all until after the premiere (and unless it’s problematic to the point where we think a negative review would spark an interesting discussion, chances are we probably won’t write about it at all). But, like some films we screened before the festival last year (see Medicine For Melancholy, My Effortless Brillance and Yeast), if we fall in love with your movie, chances are we will never shut up about it.
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As the hipster kleptomaniac at the center of Josh Safdie’s adorable debut feature The Pleasure of Being Robbed, Eleonore Hendricks steals a lot of things, but mainly the audiences’ hearts. The twentysomething actress, despite her newfound indie cinema fame, still works at the video store Cinema Nolita and binges on way too much Lukas Moodysson. After just wrapping Eric Juhola’s short film The Nowhere Kids (a fictional speculation on Gotham Award nominee and Slamdance winner Off the Grid: Life on the Mesa), Hendricks is getting ready to begin production on Safdie’s new project, Go Get Some Rosemary. In the meantime, I caught up with her to chat about Barbara Loden’s Wanda, her extra special week of moviegoing and why she gave up listening to WFMU. …Read more
This review originally ran during the SXSW Film Festival. The Pleasure of Being Robbed opens in NY today and is available on IFC Video on Demand.
What a lark this film is, what a caustic joy! As with his shorts, Josh Safdie’s first feature film, The Pleasure Of Being Robbed, is too articulate a work to describe as whimsical, turning into a pejorative what would seem to be the best adjective with which to describe it. I could describe it as entirely unique, but then I couldn’t discuss its cinematic precedents, which are probably myriad but which I’d narrow down to the one that keeps springing to mind: Bresson.
It’s like nothing Bresson has ever made, but the entire film, with its heightened naturalism and precise spontaneity, seems possessed by Bresson’s notion of cinematography - not the lighting and photography, but the art of cinematography with which he delineated between those films that elevate the medium and those that are restrained by the trappings of the theater. I guess means that the best compliment I can pay Safdie is that his work makes film better. And it’s here that I feel the need to quote his own synopsis of the film, which ends with this quizzical postulation: “It’s a comedy?”
…Read more
What a lark this film is, what a caustic joy! As with his shorts, Josh Safdie’s first feature film, The Pleasure Of Being Robbed, is too articulate a work to describe as whimsical, turning into a pejorative what would seem to be the best adjective with which to describe it. I could describe it as entirely unique, but then I couldn’t discuss its cinematic precedents, which are probably myriad but which I’d narrow down to the one that keeps springing to mind: Bresson. It’s like nothing Bresson has ever made, but the entire film, with its heightened naturalism and precise spontaneity, seems possessed by Bresson’s notion of cinematography - not the lighting and photography, but the art of cinematography with which he delineated between those films that elevate the medium and those that are restrained by the trappings of the theater. I guess means that the best compliment I can pay Safdie is that his work makes film better. And it’s here that I feel the need to quote his own synopsis of the film, which ends with this quizzical postulation: “It’s a comedy?”
…Read more
