The Cindependent Film Festival, launched in 2018 to focus on short films, is still a relative newbie among the city’s cultural offerings. Because of COVID-caused postponements, the 2024 edition—which takes place September 19-21 at Over-the-Rhine’s Memorial Hall—is just its fourth. But you’d never know it from the ambitious programming.
According to founder Allyson West, the fest’s adjudication team received 220 hours of film submissions, selected 84 shorts and two features representing 16 of those 220 total hours, and also accepted 25 screenplays for readings. Of the 86 films, 22 are from Cincinnatians.
I especially liked the visual appeal, lively use of color, stylized graphics, and overall sophistication of the festival’s outreach tools (website, poster, and YouTube channel). In fact, the Official Selections video on YouTube reminds me of the celebrated video touting Cincinnati that got the Sundance Film Festival to consider the city for its new home. This doesn’t have a poet/performance artist reciting the city’s attributes, but it does effectively use a rousing musical fanfare—and it features beautiful Memorial Hall, as does the video for Sundance.
I don’t have space to describe all 84 of the shorts to be screened or the screenplays to be read, but one screenplay (Jeffrey Joseph Baker’s I Met the Three Stooges) does scream out for attention: “A middle-aged toll booth operator who is also a Three Stooges aficionado rekindles his relationship with his high school sweetheart and, together, they attend the annual Three Stooges Convention.” Now who could miss that?
The two full-length feature films being presented also are worth describing at some length.
Ultimate Citizens is a portrait of an Iranian man, Jamshid Khajavi, who came to the U.S. in the 1970s to study and stayed when the Iranian revolution occurred. He now works in Seattle as a school guidance counselor, a job that takes him into the community to work with children of refugees and immigrants as well as their parents adapting to a new home. He’s also become a very good frisbee player. Francine Strickwerda directed the documentary, which has played festivals in Ft. Lauderdale, New York City, Seattle, and Telluride. Cindependent presents it at 3 p.m. September 19. See the trailer here.
Lone Wolves, directed by Ryan Cunningham, has an attention-getting plot, to say the least. Here’s what the festival notes say: “When a single, pragmatic forty-something recruits the eclectic guy she didn’t go to prom with back in high school to be her D-I-Y sperm donor, but (then) learns that he’s autistic and navigating some significant health images, her carefully planned hopes are turned upside down during a crazy weekend in Toledo, Ohio.” It screens at 3 p.m. September 20. See the trailer here.
West has big hopes for this year’s festival. “Cindependent has an exceptional way of sharing our indie spirit forward,” she says. “I’m excited that the city feels eager and ready to walk through our doors and see the lineup of incredible films and screenplays we’ve dedicated months to curating. Filmmakers want an audience to see their work—what’s better than connecting with that artist after a screening and getting a peek behind-the-curtain?”
Good One
[Watch the trailer. Opens August 30 at the Mariemont Theatre.]
This new film fits in with the trend of recent movies about intelligent children and adolescents who try to help their parents through bouts of unease and doubt (Aftersun, Janet Planet, Tuesday, and 2018’s Leave No Trace are previous examples). Directed by India Donaldson, Good One concerns a 17-year-old (Lily Collias) who accompanies her dad (James Le Gros) and his friend (Danny McCarthy) on a backpacking trip to New York’s Catskills region. The men don’t get along, and she finds herself trying to help her dad while realizing there’s only so far an offspring can be devoted to a parent.
The film played both the Sundance Film Festival and Cannes, where it was a Director’s Fortnight selection. “Good One is an emotionally expansive work that probes the limits of familial trust, understanding, and ultimately forgiveness,” said Peter Rainer of Film Week and NPR Los Angeles.
Sing Sing
[Watch the trailer. Currently playing at the Esquire Theatre, Cinemark Oakley, and AMC Newport.]
The film’s distributor, Oscar-minded A24, has been opening Sing Sing around the country slowly, hoping that word of mouth can carefully build a following for its tough subject—prisoners trying to find a meaningful creative outlet in a theater program. It stars the fast-rising Colman Domingo, who’s been receiving Academy Award talk for his role. In my August film column, I quoted Lisa Kennedy’s New York Times review, which is worth mentioning again: “Colman Domingo imbues his character John Whitfield, a.k.a. Divine G, with a steadfast compassion but also the tamped-down frustrations of a man convicted of a crime he says he didn’t commit. And Clarence Maclin—a formerly incarcerated newcomer whose story, along with that of the actual Whitfield, the film is built upon—burrows into his former self in a finessed and fierce performance as Divine Eye, the prison-yard alpha who auditions for Sing Sing’s Rehabilitation Through the Arts theater program. That program is the movie’s other star.”
Between the Temples
[Watch the trailer. Currently playing at the Mariemont Theatre, AMC Newport, and AMC West Chester.]
Nathan Silver’s new film is both touching and funny telling the story of a developing relationship between Ben (Jason Schwartzman), a distraught cantor who can’t sing and who lost his wife in an accident, and Carla (Carol Kane), an older woman who was his music teacher way back in grade school. Now retired and a widow, she wants to receive a belated Bat Mitzvah.
The Guardian’s Wendy Ide nicely describes the film’s strengths: “Voices—the loss of them, the way they can be trampled and flattened by people who feel they know best—are at the heart of Nathan Silver’s abrasively heartfelt comedy drama Between the Temples, an idiosyncratic and bittersweet American indie set in upstate New York. Benjamin Gottlieb (Jason Schwartzman) has lost his voice, or at least the ability to sing. And this is a problem: fortysomething Ben is a cantor; he chants the prayers and passages from the Torah to the congregation in an inclusive, liberal reform synagogue. And then there’s the voice of Carol Kane, Schwartzman’s co-lead in this odd-couple story—Harold and Maude is an obvious reference—that finds comfort in the unexpected connection between two slightly broken people.”
Psychotronic Film Festival 2024
[Screens September 26-28 at the Esquire Theatre.]
Outer Cinema’s Justin Weise describes his festival programming in an email: “We’re showcasing eight weird and wild cult films from around the globe, including cult favorites Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky and Tank Girl; the new restoration of the grindhouse/arthouse forgotten gem Hollywood 90028; a 50th anniversary screening of the blaxploitation voodoo zombie flick Sugar Hill; the bizarre lost children’s film The Rare Blue Apes of Cannibal Isle; the gory video store favorite Mutant Hunt; the Croatian sci-fi mind-melter Visitors of the Arkana Galaxy; and the infamous cyberpunk sequel Tetsuo II: Body Hammer.”
Sounds like fun. Get ticket info here.
American Psycho
[Screens at 7:30 p.m. September 4 at the Esquire Theatre.]
Leontine Cinema, which once a month offers significant films directed by women, presents director Mary Harron and co-screenwriter Guinevere Turner’s 2000 adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ 1991 book about a New York Yuppie who’s a psycho killer. The book was so grisly and over-the-top that it prompted an intense public backlash, and few thought it could be turned into the big screen. But by toning down the violence and accentuating the satire, the filmmaker’s made a well-reviewed movie.
Seven Samurai
[Screens at 7 p.m. September 4 at the Kenwood Theatre.]
Film scholar Joe Horine presents another offering of his “deep dive” presentation of Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 classic, the 207-minute story of 16th-century samurai defending farmers against attackers. The film recently got a 4K restoration and looks great.
Rancho Deluxe
[Screens at 7:30 p.m. September 5 at the Esquire Theatre.]
I’m thrilled to hear that presenter Secret Base Cinema/LFDW is showing a rare big-screen revival of Frank Perry’s wonderfully quirky 1975 film that’s part western, part comedy. Novelist Thomas McGuane (Ninety-two in the Shade) set the action in then-modern-day Livingston, Montana, where two drifter cattle rustlers (Jeff Bridges and Sam Waterston) try to scam a wealthy rancher (Clifton James). The eclectic cast also includes Elizabeth Ashley, Slim Pickens, Harry Dean Stanton, Patti D’Arbanville, Jimmy Buffet, and more.
Weekend
[Screens at 7:30 p.m. September 10 at the Esquire Theatre.]
Swiss-born Jean-Luc Godard was one of the French New Wave’s greatest directors—one of history’s greatest directors, really—and this 1967 film was one of his greatest efforts. At the time, this deeply unnerving yet also strange tale of people caught in a massive traffic jam was seen as a metaphor for the pile-up of crises affecting bourgeois society in the tumultuous 1960s. But after more than five decades of watching expanding highways lead to ever-more traffic tie-ups and road-rage incidents, it may now work of a literal level. Driving is hell!
Woodward Theater Screenings
The Woodward’s deeply informed film programming continues with gusto in September: five different titles, six screenings. For me, the most exciting presentation occurs September 30, when the new Boom: A Film About the Sonics screens. Directed by Jordan Albertson, it documents the exciting neo-garage and neo-punk rock band the Sonics, who came out of the Pacific Northwest in the early 1960s.
While they never broke big too far away from their Tacoma hometown and nearby Seattle and were kaput by the late 1960s, they were subsequently rediscovered because of their wildly edgy original songs like “Psycho,” “Strychnine,” and “The Witch.” The band reformed off and on through the decades and in 2015 released their first new album in 40 years. An accompanying tour brought them to the Woodward for a memorable show in April of that year. The best description of the band can be heard in the trailer: “They’re rooted in 1950s R&B and Rock & Roll, but as played by a freight train.”
Another exciting Woodward screening of a recent film occurs September 2-3, when Mike Cheslik’s Hundreds of Beavers arrives. It sounds weirder than Tim Walz says Donald Trump is. As I wrote in my August film column, it’s about a 19th-century applejack salesman who, through various plot turns, needs to become North America’s premier fur trapper in order to win the hand of the woman he loves. That means chasing after hundreds of beavers. Playing those critters are adults in costumes, though the film also uses animation techniques and special effects. It’s meant to be comic and a tribute to slapstick and has been getting excellent reviews.
UFC champion Mark Muñoz’s crowdfunded action comedy Lumpia With a Vengeance screens on September 9, Pascal Plante’s suspenseful directorial debut Red Rooms is on September 10, and a restored version of the 1994 classic from New Zealand, Once Were Warriors, is on September 23. The Woodward brings back perennial favorite Stop Making Sense on October 1.
All Woodward screenings are at 7:30 p.m. Get tickets and more info here.
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