Cast

Lucy Adden, Mark Aaron, Toben Seymour, Sean Thomas, Bernadette Murray

awards

Raindance FF 2009 – best debut feature

Film description

A hypnotic visual portrait set during the Great Depression in a wild and desolate corner of the United States. A family of farmers living secluded among the mountains fights for survival, fending off hunger, desolation and the death grip of untamed and untrammeled nature. The surrounding natural world is one of the film’s major forces, pushing the envelope of boundaries to the point of no return.

It is a sullen story of family disintegration with oneiric visuals, where snippets of dialogue, characters, and events coalesce out of a dreamy forest, emerge from putrid verdancies, only to dissolve into violent rays of sun shooting through the leaves. The preternatural world is filled with a brutal, sensual charm where even nightmares radiate attention-demanding beauty. Cinematographer Zoran Popović rejects completely the classic rules of composition in favor of working with light, texture, and focus, while exploiting aberrant close-ups, filters, and overexposure. In going against the digital grain of contemporary independent cinema, the film is shot on 35mm and subjected to a long chemical process. The images meld into a living impressionist canvas evoking Mallick, Brakhage or a cinematic group hallucination.

Grzegorz Kurek