The Zero Film Festival, dedicated to serving “a niche in the independent film community, which has been under appreciated and ignored” by “screening self-financed and zero budget films from filmmakers all over the world”, kicks off tonight with a party in DUMBO, Brooklyn. They’ll be screening short films by some familiar names, including Lena Dunham, Mary Bronstein, Zach Clark and Aaron Katz. According to the fest, Katz’s SXSW 2008 selection Let’s Get Down to Brass Tackswill screen, and Dunham will premiere a new short called Misfire, “about two friends discussing the semantics of a reply to an IM, but it ‘misfires’ when they accidentally hit send.” The lineup also includes Mike Smith’s Chapters 13-22 of R. Kelly’s Trapped In The Closet Synced and Played Simultaneously (see chapters 1-12 above). There’s more info on the event and the fest here.
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.
As SXSW 2009 approaches we’ll be asking filmmakers to spill the superficial details about their films, to tell us all the deep personal details of what makes them tick, and –– new this year! –– reveal who they had to sleep with, in the incestuous conspiracy-minded secret society that is the wider SXSW community, in order to get their film programmed at the festival.
Today we take a look at Creative Nonfiction, an Emerging Visions entry from Lena Dunham, who you might remember from Brandon’s Media Diet interview back in January, which was pegged to the debut of her very funny and still ongoing web series, Delusional Downtown Divas. Answering The 5 Questions We Ask Everyone, Lena tells us about what 9 year old kids won’t let her get away with, and uses the phrase “boning Mark Ruffalo,” for which she has instantly won our hearts. The Nonfiction trailer is embedded above.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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