This post is part of a series of brief, email interviews that we’re conducting with select filmmakers who are showing work at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. All of our Sundance 2009 coverage lives here.
Ry Russo-Young, whose first feature Orphans was recently released on DVD by Carnivalesque Films, makes her first trip to Sundance next week with You Won’t Miss Me. Described as a “kaleidoscopic narrative”, this New Frontiers section selection stars Stella Schnabel (daughter of Julian) and incorporates a wide variety of formats, including 16mm film and 1-chip video.
You can check out the trailer at the filmmaker’s web site; her answers to The Four Questions We Ask Everyone, including praise for Steve Martin and creative Xeroxing, are below the jump. Miss Me has its premiere on Friday, January 16 at the Holiday Village.
The latest release from Carnivalesque Films, the DVD initiative spearheaded by filmmakers David Redmon and Ashley Sabin, hits stores (and Amazon, etc) today. It’s Orphans, Ry Russo-Young’s debut feature, which premiered and won a Jury Prize at the SXSW Film Festival in 2006. It’s a family horror film of sorts, about two estranged sisters who get together for one weekend of boozy recollection and reconnection gone wrong. I’ve written about the film briefly before; you can see also a conversation with Russo-Young and Tom Hall, and a crazy in-depth “breakdown” of Orphans by Ry and Noralil Ryan Fores. The trailer is above. Also: last week Brandon talked to Ry about Fassbinder and her latent desire to make a film with Amy Winehouse.
Ry Russo-Young, who many will remember from her role in Joe Swanberg’s Hannah Takes the Stairs, was a prize winner at two of the last three SXSWs - she won the jury award for best experimental film for her Psycho deconstruction Marion at the 2006 fest and shared a special jury prize for Orphans at the 2007 edition. Orphans hits DVD next week via David Redmon and Ashley Sabin’s brand new label Carnivalesque Films. She chatted with us this week about Why Does Herr R Run Amok?, what working with the band “The Virgins” on her new film You Won’t Miss Me was like and why concert films aren’t really for her unless Amy Winehouse or The Rolling Stones are in them. …Read more
Exciting news from David Redmon and Ashley Sabin, co-directors of a couple of our favorite recent docs, Kamp Katrina and Intimidad: they’re expanding the purview of their production company, Carnivalesque Films, in order to start distributing DVDs. Their first release will be their own film, the 2005 Sundance premiere Mardi Gras: Made in China, and it’ll be available, to quote David, “everywhere,” on July 29. In the coming months, Carnivalesque will distribute two festival favorites: Ry Russo-Young’s SXSW Special Jury prize winner Orphans, and The Holy Modal Rounders: Bound to Lose. The Mardi Gras trailer is embedded above; we’ll pass along more details on Carnivalesque’s upcoming releases as we get them.
The Cinetrix went to Independents Week at the Harvard Film Archive, and came back raving about the dance scenes in three of the films that screened there. The films were Hannah Takes the Stairs, Quiet City, and a film I had not previously been aware of called Finally, Lillian and Dan, directed by a local filmmaker named Mike Gibisser. Here’s what The Cinetrix had to say:
[In] all three films there are spontaneous, visceral dance sequences that soar. Mike Gibisser’s real-life granny dances rapturously to a Jolie Holland tune; Hannah and roommate Rocco rock out as they work through Hannah’s romantic confusion; and Jamie, Charlie, Robin, and Kyle dreamily groove to an r&b track replaced by the diegetic music of Keegan DeWitt [rights issues]. These inarticulate idealists connect through the physical movement to music in a way that makes the cinetrix’s bricolage-lovin’ heart sing.
The ‘trix goes on to seek suggestions on great “musical moments in non-musicals.” I saw Hannah and Quiet City at SXSW in March, where they formed another non-musical dance scene trio with a film that did not screen at Independent’s Week, Ry Russo-Young’s Orphans. The dance scene in Orphans is a dizzying concoction of love, envy, double entendre, competition, ill-fitting party dresses, resentment and Absolut Citron. It’s not only my favorite of the three scenes, but it’s probably one of my favorite scenes in any American film of this decade.
I find it fascinating that naturalistic dance scenes are becoming as much of a hallmark of these Mumblecore films as improvised dialogue and hand-held video. Within the context of these relatively static narratives, the dances become as spectacular as a climactic car chase or series of explosion in a Hollywood movie.
I also recently watched Macao for the first time, a non-musical which has an amazing scene of Jane Russell singing “One For My Baby.” But that’s not really a dance scene, so I’ll save that discussion for another time.
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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