Taking Another Waltz: Dances with Films 19

Posted on by Diversions LA

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Dances with Films 19 finished a week ago, and the festival continued to amaze even as it drew to a close. Missed the fest this year? Then put it on your calendars for next year, and do watch for the stellar films shown at the festival. While these reviews bring those screened at the event to a close, there are several we missed seeing in the theater that we’ll be catching up on shortly.

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Above, cast, crew, and advisors on The Track; with microphone, star Mariah Kirstie

The Track started as a short film by director Brett Caroline Levner, and was expanded into a feature by Levner and writer Matthew McCue. “I looked out my window one day,” Levner relates, “and I saw a 15 year old girl going in and out of cars, working as a prostitute.” Drawn to tell the story of underage, exploited children, Levner, who teaches film at University of Nevada Las Vegas, tackled the tough and moving story of Barbie.

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Played brilliantly by Mariah Kirstie, the girl comes into contact with a suburban woman who has just lost her daughter, played by Missy Yager.  “I come from a theater background,” Kirstie reports, “but for this character I didn’t do anything formal. I was so connected to her, I just wanted to stay in the moment with my performance.” Yager says “This is a woman’s issue, these little girls get arrested. My character had a calling to help.”

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The performances make the film, a true vehicle for social justice, into a compelling drama.

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Above, star Joe Burke in Dependents Day

Dependents Day, a very different film, also began as a short. Director David Lynch (below) found star Joe Burke and a ribald romantic comedy was born. “I love nuance,” Lynch says,  “I thought he was a firecracker and all I had to do was set him off.” The versatile Lynch was also director of a dramatic documentary screening at the festival, Victor Walk, which won the audience award in the docs category; but Dependents is pure levity.

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The story of a struggling actor claimed as ‘dependent” by his more successful girlfriend,  the film tackles love, LA lifestyle, and sexual mores with a witty vengence.

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Star Burke says “We put so much into this, I’m so emotional to have so many people I love in one room. I feel so blessed.” Shot in just 17 days, the comedy is zany, the performances from Burke and co-star Benita Robledo pitch perfect.

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Above with microphone, Kristin Wallace, co-writer/producer/star of Moments of Clarity

Moments of Clarity is a film that defies categorization. Sweet comedy, female buddy picture, road movie, witty take on independence, feminism, mental health issues – yes, all of those. A film that keeps you guessing, we loved it’s wild moments of comedy, touching sweetness, and screwball plot. Writer/producer Kristin Wallace plays lead Claire. Co-written by Wallace and Christian Lloyd, the film was directed by Stev Elam.

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Claire is the daughter of a repressed agoraphobic, who teams up with a pastor’s daughter to escape their home town, fix a broken camera, and come into their own. “I wanted to create more roles for women,” says Candian-born Wallace. “I’d just moved from Toronto to LA and felt very out of place, so I kind of connected with my inner child to create this character. I just wanted to follow this character who was unabashedly herself.” Shot in 15 days, the film has the look of a much larger-budgeted feature, with bright colors, hilarious set pieces, and the edge of dark-comedy ever sharpened.

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Wallace and Lloyd wrote only via email and didn’t meat Wallace and the rest of the production team until he came to the set for the last four days of shooting. “I Just sat there smiling like an idiot. It didn’t make sense that so many people came together to make such a wonderful film and have such a strong connection.”

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Director Elam says “I loved that the script had so much positivity and no violence. When I read the script I thought this is like a foreign film, but they have American names. Then they said they were Canadian,” he laughs.

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Whatever the origin, this is a don’t-miss. It releases in the fall of 2016, watch for it.

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Rounding up the fest’s final day at the TCL Chinese was Those Left Behind, a drama that grew from the director’s involvement in a documentary about suicide.

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The drama recounts a family’s struggle to come to terms with the grief over their son’s suicide 25 years earlier.

“You can live a joyous life and still struggle with depression,” says Grant Jordan, who plays the pivotal character of Jamie.

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“I think a lot about loss in my own life, and how unresolved grief comes back to people, so I wanted to use that. I had an amazing cast, I asked people to be very quiet, to let the performances and the story build slowly. It was like unpeeling an onion,” director Maria Finitzo says.

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Also viewed: Killing the Apologetic Girl, the fest’s audience award winner in the TV pilot category.  Writers Stephanie Little, Kimberly Aboltin – the latter also directed – have created a sweet and funny  story about the overly-apologetic Steph and her returned-from-Morocco decidedly unapologietic friend, Kim. Fresh and delightfully sarcastic, there’s a lot to like and much to want to see more of with these characters. Well-paced and exceptionally well-cast.

Don’t worry: Josephine Doe, Pop-Up, and fest top narrative award winner Virtual Revolution reviews are still coming up.

  • Genie Davis; All photos: Jack Burke

 

We’re Still Dancing #DWF19

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Above, creators and stars – what indie filmmaking is all about – How We Met.

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Above, cast and crew of Misfortune.

Dances with Film ended tonight, but we’ve still got more films on our dance card to review.

Misfortune screened Friday evening, a crime caper shot in Tucson, directed and co-written by Desmond Devenish, Xander Bailey co-writer. Devnish and Bailey also co-star in a film involving a diamond heist, betrayal, and a multi-generational crime legacy. Stellar turns by Kevin Gage as the chief bad guy and a small, well-tuned part by Steve Earle added to the pleasure of this desert noir.

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“We were looking for something gritty we could do on our own,” Bailey says.

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Devenish previously had a script in pre-production when the financing fell through. “This project was somewhat based on that experience. We wanted to do something that dealt with greed and money,” he laughs. His first feature as a director, Devenish credits his success wearing three hats, as lead, writer, and director to “having such an incredible group to work with.” DP Seth Johnson explored the desert locales with Devenish. “We spent six days shot listing before we shot a key sequence at Picture Rock.” A 27-day shoot, the film was two years in the writing and a year on editing, with sound effects being the biggest challenge.

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Best Q & A question of the night – why was the getaway car a Suburu? “It was my car,” Devenish reports.

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Beacon Point is a sometimes campy horror film with many twists and turns set on the Appalachian trail.

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“The woods are a great spot for a creepy movie,” director and co-writer Eric Blue says of his Georgia-wood main location. Shot in 23 days, 8 using drone footage, the production veers from horror into sci-fi, but it wasn’t aliens that attacked strong female lead Rae Olivier.

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“I was attacked by chiggers,” she says, describing what became a keep-off ritual as “bug spray morning and night. It was muggy and buggy in the woods.” As to her role: “I liked Zoe’s arc, she had so much to overcome and huge purpose. I saw her as a relatable girl thrown a lot of curve balls that made her a survivor in the end.”

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The film was partially funded by Kickstarter, and director Blue stressed the importance of marketing not just one’s film, but a Kickstarter as well. “You have to know how to get the word out there.”

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How We Met is one fantastic dark comedy. Both brilliantly subversive, clever, and sweetly romantic, it’s hard to overstate how hilarious, fresh, and simply original this film is.

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Writers Chadwick Hopson, Brian Flaccus, Oscar Rene Lozoya II – with Lozoya helming as director, take their pitch perfect ensemble cast including Christina Moses, Chadwick Hopson, Ice-T, Brian Flaccus, Jonathan Kehoe, Cale Epps, David Weiss, Alex Raines, Alex Davidson through the paces of a blind date that goes terribly awry with the murder of a corrupt cop, a very promiscuous ex-girlfriend, drug dealing/dj ex-boyfriend, and a family business that’s most unexpected.

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Unbelievably, the script was written in a “week. The three of us have been writing sketches together for years,” says Hopson. Even more surprising – “the budget was $1000,” says Lozoya. The miniscule budget was assisted by shooting in Flaccus and Hopson’s hometown of Flagstaff and a tight 8-day shoot. The project was shot using Black Magic and Pocket Cinema cameras.

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“Somehow, every obstacle turned out to have an even better solution to the problem,” Hopson says.

The three co-writers describe themselves as “true rom-com fans.”

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Moses was among 300 actresses called in to audition. “I loved it because it was funny, quirky, weird, but has so much heart. Everyone can relate to the dating story, and it was told with so much humor.”

How We Met just must be seen – because it’s hilariously wonderful and because you won’t believe how great it looks for such a small initial cost. Someone should snatch this one up.

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The Drama Club was not in competition at the festival, but was a premiere of DWF alums.

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A funky, sexy, fun Big Chill-type reunion among, no surprise members of a high school drama club and their significant others, a tight script based around a location director Joe McClean and friends visited annually resulted in a deeply involving ensemble comedy-drama.

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“I wrote the script and then invited these people, most of which I’ve known a long time, to do a table read in 2014. We all really bonded.”

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Liza de Weerd ‘s Elle is a particularly strong character. “I found it important and interesting that you can write a sexually liberated character that gets judged so easily, whereas a man would not,” the actress notes.

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Director McClean adds “One of the biggest themes in the movie is the big difference in treatment between men and women. And in the end, the movie is about growing up and the fact that we’ve all got our baggage, we all understand life, and the idea of friendship, and how things don’t matter in the same way – when you are with old friends, they understand and they don’t care.”

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Dances with Films: 19 Years of Indie Cinema Keeps Rocking

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Above, director and stars of The Salton Sea.

DWF19 has – as Dances with Films does every year – presented a wide slate of films, some absolutely awe-inspiringly wonderful. The variety of narrative films, documentaries, shorts, music videos, and kids programming alone should make film-lovers flock to the festival, and the chance to see some truly transcendent cinema in the mix is something to really celebrate.

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This week screenings included The Salton Sea, director Veena Sud’s two-hander about an alcoholic wandering the desert (Jamie Anne Allman) and the hitchhiker (Diarra Kilpatrick) she reluctantly picks up after what may have been a hit and run.  As eerie and exotic as its setting, one which we are personally very familiar with, this unusual redemption story has an ending which surprises and resonates in a film that works both as visual poetry and narrative story telling.

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Allman had recently had a baby, and director Sud accommodated during the seven day, two-weekend shoot, providing an air-conditioned truck following behind the actresses to support Allman and her baby. “It was wonderful,” Allman attests, “I had the support of work with women who did not mind working with a new mom.”

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Sud describes the film as a “kind of f-d up My Dinner with Andre, a forced intimacy between the two women with a lot of dialog.” Shot on a Sony F-3 and budgeted at $70,000, the elegaic beauty of the film’s locations in Niland, Calipatria, and the sea itself was itself a third character. Sud chose her actors carefully. “I’ve watched Jamie Anne in The Shield, I cast her in The Killing, I knew I wanted her for this. Diana, I saw in the play The Interlopers, and I knew she was the one.”

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Singapore Sling writer/producer Neto DePaula Pimenta and director Marcus Sigrist with DP Ivan Rodrigues, above.

Singapore Sling is revelatory cinema. Writer/producer Neto DePaula Pimenta and director Marcus Sigrist assembled a stellar cast: Cinthya Hussey, Samuel de Assis, Angelica di Paula, and Neto DePaula Pimenta himself in a brilliant depiction of what happens when two former lovers reconnect – and bring along their current significant others. The Brazillian film is absolutely gorgeous, with DP Ivan Rodrigues crafting something exceptional in every scene. “It’s all about the integrity of style. We did long takes with the characters in perspectives, we used steadycam, mirrors bouncing into the house for light, no articifical lighting. I just had to figure it out and commit to it. It’s hard to shoot dialog heavy scenes, to decide what you are going to do with the camera. We had to figure out how the actors would walk and block their movements. Each day we’d block the next day’s shoot.”

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Pimenta adds “I got Ivan involved by the time Marcus and I had finished the script. it worked because he was a part of the movie, we’ve worked together for years and I knew it would not be static of theater-like.”

Almost unbelievable that this gorgeous and emotionally charged film was shot in just eight days for $15,000.

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“It started off with Marcus calling me and suggesting we make a movie with very little resources. We’ve known each other since 6th grade,” Pimenta says.

“Oiriginally, Neto wasn’t planning to be in the film, but we needed a fourth actor and he ended up playing Bruno,” Sigrist says.

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“I loved creating a film without a standard Hollywood ending,” Pimenta adds. “I’m a big admirer of films like The Graduate.” Don’t miss this film.

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Above, cast and crew of I Live For You.

I Live For You was originally going to be an entirely different film, according to this quirky, very dark comedy mystery’s director,  Monika Wesley. “We were originally going to be shooting a project called Great Barrington, a more standard mystery.” But her co-writer, Brandon Zinn, “got bored.”

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Instead they decided, according to Zinn, to make something “weird and twisted.”

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“We had no money,” Wesley attests, “we were just two people who wanted to make a movie. We pared it down, we shot for as minimal amount as we could, and spent a month just rehearsing. Casting was super important, just really important to have terrific, charming actors because we got a lot of notes that otherwise our characters were despicable.”

 

Both despicable and charming are Sean (Rob Hook) and Kate (Hannah Telle) as two people who meet through a complex plot involving a dead father, an unknown half brother, a suicide-wish, and so much more.  No spoilers here, but this LA set love story is kind of an anti-rom/com. Telle is a singer-songwriter as well as an actress, and her musical skills become instrinsic to the plot.  Taut and funny, the film’s unexpected twists and turns keeps both audience and its characters on their toes.

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Also viewed: Writer/Director Jake Hulse crafts the tale of two boyfriend friends who decide to the do the patriotic thing and enlist after 9/11 in Heroes Don’t Come Home. One goes, one stays, a strong bond remains between the conflicted heroes, primarily set in rural Maine.

More reviews of more – of course – exciting films and festival summary posting soon. See you at the movies!

 

 

 

 

Do You Like to Dance? Step on Out with Dances with Films

Posted on by Diversions LA

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Cast and crew of Valley of Ditches, above.

Dances with Films continues with strong line-ups every day through the 12th.

Two horror/suspense films, Shortwave and Valley of Ditches captured our attention over the weekend.

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Shortwave cast and crew above.

Shortwave made me scream and jump – the intense audio soundtrack, stunning camera moves, and sleek/modern contained interior setting brought chills and thrills.

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Director/writer Ryan Gregory Phillips was “inspired by creepy sounds coming from the TV, and then the script was written in three days. We really wanted to do something like Ex Machina with our location. We wanted to make the setting real, but we wanted our characters trapped in the modernism, to create a real aura of claustrophobia,” he says.

One technique used was vasoline on the camera lens and diopter. “It allowed us to keep with the negative space, and create isolation in our shots.”

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The New York state location is actually the director’s own home. “We built the lab in my garage in four days,” he relates.

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He says the biggest challenge in the film was “having our characters express their loss, deal with the loss of their daughter in a meaningful way.” The story revolves around the sudden abduction of the daughter of a research scientist and his wife, aliens seeking contact, mysterious sounds on the shortwave radio, and the intensity of loss. “There’s a prequel and a sequel we’ve talked about,” Phillips says. “If this does well, you’ll see something even more screwed up than what was on screen this time.”

Juanita Ringeling as Isabel, the mom living with her loss day by day, gives an especially intense performance.

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Cast and crew of Valley of Ditches, above.

Valley of Ditches served up a leaner take on horror than Shortwave, but an incredibly effective and beautifully intense one. Set in the desert of Joshua Tree, a girl and her boyfriend are abducted from their van, the boyfriend killed, the girl left for dead by the Bible-quoting madman who kidnapped her.

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“Our logline,” director Christopher James Lang explains, “is a woman is left for dead and struggles to keep her sanity in a dark but accessible horror film. It’s an intensely personal struggle. We were trying to make a horror thriller that’s very accessible to general audiences.”

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He and writer/star Amanda Todisco have succeeded, shooting over ten days using C300 digital. “It took us a year to edit. The film is having its world premiere at Dances with Films.”

Currently in talks with agents and distributors, the director should see good things ahead for this chilling, nail-biting film with a great third act twist.

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“The project came about when Amanda and I were touring with our first feature, Our life in Make Believe, which is basically an uplifting road movie,” Lang states.  “We decided that working together, looking for something darker would have more impact.”

The two worked on the script together, with Lang passing his outline to Todisco.

She says “People told us that with no-name leads it would be easier to sell horror. So James did the outline, the story line, and sent it to me. I added all the weird religious stuff. I wanted to give Sean, the murderer, a reason for what he did. We found a great quote from Kings 2 in the Bible, and built our idea around that.”

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While shooting in the desert presented it’s challenges according to cinematographer Jack Yan Chen, who stabbed his hand on a cactus, the setting “shaped the performances. Dealing with the elements was a great challenge, but the desert itself was really another character.”

“It was an amazing setting,” Lang adds.

Pacing and editing are intensely perfect; this is a simply terrific film that will have you looking over your shoulder all the way home.

Don’t have Dances with Films tickets yet? Get them now!