soft shell
“Another year, another new/next” seems to be a sure thing in Baltimore. After the inaugural festival last year, it was unclear whether the New/Next Film Festival would be a one-time event or if the Maryland Film Festival would return from hiatus. Both will be held a few months and a block apart at Station North in 2024, and on the closing night both announced they will return in 2025. For now, Baltimore has two strong independent film festivals with no juries. What is not certain is how they will interact as institutions rather than events with question marks. While MdFF concluded with speeches from the governor of Maryland and the mayor of Baltimore, New/Next was less formal and featured the fest’s main sponsor (local NPR affiliate WYPR) and the fest’s co-founder and lead programmer. We opened and closed with Eric’s greetings. Allen Hatch. As I reported in May, MdFF is back with organizational power. The new/next is here by sheer force of will.
This year’s lineup has been significantly expanded. The inaugural festival screened 75 films compared to this year’s 126 (23 features and 52 shorts, 37 features and 89 shorts). All five of Charles Theater’s screens are up 68% (from four screens last year) for three full days and opening night. With more than 200 film representatives in attendance, Hatch said the festival had a budget to cover and accommodate one person for each film, but short filmmakers did not. In other words, New/Next was deemed valuable to filmmakers, he noted. The majority of industry participants travel to Baltimore at their own expense. That was too much. Granted, it’s physically impossible (and not entirely necessary) to see everything, and despite spending 12 hours a day at Charles and going to multiple screenings. I keep running into friends around town who I’ve never passed before at short theater screenings. corridor. Too many great films is perhaps the biggest problem facing film festivals, especially in their second year. It depends on the film festival. It can be maintained or strengthened by playing the movie more times, or by increasing the number of calendar days that can be sustained and extended.
Festivals like New/Next have two direct functions. One is to attract people and films to the city, and the other is what the city can project. In addition, New/Next will feature director Joel Potrykas’ Tribeca premiere film Vulcanizadora (2024), Carson Rand’s directorial debut Eefus (2024) (simultaneously screening at NYFF), and It continues to run the festival, bringing in low-budget festival favorites such as Lisandro Alonso’s Eureka (2023). Circuit after it premiered at Cannes over a year ago. New/Next is probably the only time any of these films will be shown at Charles, which is currently the city’s only first-run theater focused on independent and international films.
Chloë Robichaud’s third feature, 2023’s Happily Ever After, stands out among films that have been stuck in limbo between festival screenings and eventual streaming release. Robichaud was one of the sharpest newcomers to Quebec cinema in the 2010s, but despite a limited release in the province, “Days” failed to make a splash overseas. This very much mirrors another film whose logline is about a lesbian conductor who experiences interpersonal and professional conflicts while preparing for a climactic sequence centered around Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. This may be partially due to the fact that But the textual similarities with TÁR (2022) end there, with the film playing up “Adagietto” as a winking reference to “Death in Venice” (1971). “Days of Happiness” attempts to explore how the act of directing functions as a form. We take music and art seriously as a process of understanding ourselves and learn about artistic and emotional expression. Days of Happiness is held together by the central performance of Sophie Desmarais, who reunites with Robichaux for the first time in more than a decade since they co-starred in Sarah Prefers to Run (2013). It mainly consists of Desmarais reacting to the world around him.
In terms of projection, Corey Hughes’ first feature, Your Final Meditation (2024), was New/Next’s only feature produced in Baltimore. Midnight Sun frontwoman Hannah Olivegren stars as Jodi, a woman who races through a VR-guided meditation that slowly moves towards a devastating conclusion. Your Final Meditation’s digitally generated imagery uses a 360-degree camera to create a disorienting and alienating reality/videogame hybrid aesthetic. Because it’s purely mesmerizing. But while Jodie slides deeper and deeper into VR’s inner world, her physical reality is at risk. The building she lives in has been sold. Shot at Floristree, a warehouse space in the H&H Arts Building in downtown Baltimore during the final weeks before the new owners took over from the vacated tenants, Your Final Meditation also documents the rapidly disappearing DIY Baltimore era. there is. According to Hughes, many of Jodie’s rooms are “constructed from furniture, artwork, objects, and plants that have lived in the space for more than 20 years and have been passed down among the artists and musicians who lived there.” “Ta”.
The film also serves as a showcase for the production talent established in the city’s scene over the past decade. Hughes was the regular cinematographer for both Theo Anthony and Marnie Ellen Hartzler, and Your Final Meditation was produced by Jonah McCone (All Right Everywhere (2021)). ), Squeegee (2024)), Daniel April (The Sweet East (2023)), cinematography by Tyler Davis (Strawberry Mansion (2021)), production design by Becca Morin (Unedited Bear Footage ( (2014), Rat Film (2016)) and VFX by Meredith Moore (Margie Soudek’s Salt & Pepper Shakers (2023)). Also connecting these local artists is the production company MEMORY. While based in LA, MEMORY has opened a second location at MdFF in Baltimore, along with Anthony’s Rat Film and Hertzler’s Crestone (2020). At this year’s New/Next, MEMORY screened Asher Penn’s debut documentary, Physician, Heal Thyself, about the controversial Canadian doctor and author Gabor Maté. MEMORY also chose New/Next as one of the venues for their 10th anniversary celebration (with Dan Deacon as the DJ, of course). This further proves New/Next’s lineage with the filmmaking community from the heyday of MdFF.
By independent film standards, these are established faces. Who’s next? The short program is always the first thing I watch, but two programs fascinated me more than others. In Christian Meola’s GANGBANG (2023), shirtless, conventionally attractive young men of all stripes stand around a bed and smile for the camera. That shot continues to hold far beyond comfort until everyone starts laughing. The images begin to fade into each other, revealing close-ups of smiling faces and the men in various poses around the bed. It’s gay porn without the porn, only the anticipation of a display of physical pleasure that never comes. In late-night programming, Philip Thompson’s Living Reality (2024) begins as a faux-2000s sitcom, blending the rhythms of How I Met Your Mother with the haunting textures of a dying domestic violence camera. Some have quipped about the audience’s reaction, but when Thompson’s Theo chimes in, his frustration is met by dead air between laughs. Theo leaves the clean three walls of the initial set and returns to a small apartment with a mattress on the floor and an old TV. The footage Theo sees from the edge of reality on TV is a reverse sitcom that serves the same escapist function, the sordid, sordid truth of young people living in “real” apartments and having “real” conversations. It is. As the camera zooms in and out in the dim lighting, the grain of the image collapses, transforming an ordinary interaction into the swirling fantasies of an ordinary young man.
The best films of the festival appeared out of the blue through submissions on FilmFreeway. “It’s rare for a film programmer to come across a discovery as powerful as ‘Soft Shell’ (2024) in a call for films,” Hatch wrote in his programming notes. “But I wasn’t dreaming. Soft shells are real.” I agree: Jino Myung’s first feature was in Josh Safdie’s The Joy of Deprivation (2002) in New York It’s reminiscent of Andrew Bujalski’s understated formal confidence and delicate, human texture in Funny Ha Ha (2002), combined with the street vibe of Funny Ha Ha (2002). 2008) (plus some narrative nods to the latter, to boot). But that doesn’t mean Myung is imitating her. Instead, his style is visceral, foreboding the feelings of alienation that run between the lines of dialogue, conveying emotions in ways that words can’t express, but that, if done right, can sometimes be expressed on film. Soft Shell, which follows a Thai-American brother and sister as they navigate early adulthood in the wake of their mother’s death, often abandons traditional reporting and temporality in order to condense a multiscreen narrative. The overlay for displaying text messages on the screen is replaced by a diptych image that shows the full body of the character sending the message within the environment. This is exactly the opposite of what messages exist in the Messages app. Jinho Myung found New/Next and New/Next found him. I hope more people are trying to find out about both.
