Perhaps what’s most impressive about If That Mockingbird Don’t Sing is that its writer-director just recently turned 20 years old. Sophie Bones – who makes a small cameo appearance as well – riffs on Juno and teenage pregnancy with the right balance of laughs and heart, even when its characters are often painted with a broad brush. The story follows Sydnie (played with an impressive maturity by Aitana Doyle), who discovers she’s pregnant after breaking up with her dipshit college-bound boyfriend Lucas (Braxton Fannin).
There are abrupt character shifts, like the almost forced love triangle that develops about halfway through, or Lucas’s changing feelings on being a father or his immediate reaction to the gender of the baby. But Bones peppers in some truly thoughtful and genuine scenes that elevate If That Mockingbird Don’t Sing above your run of the mill regional film festival indie. A scene between Sydnie and Lucas’s mother Carrie (Catherine Curtin) subverts expectations by painting the two as allies, rather than showing Carrie as the agitator. Scenes like this go a long way in differentiating the film from your average romantic comedy with overly qualified stars in supporting roles. The whole endeavor isn’t perfect, but it’s got enough positives to show that Bones has the chops to be a young, original voice in indie storytelling.
All American is one of the more conventional documentaries to be found at Heartland, but it’s no less emotional. First-time director Mark Andrew Altschul chronicles the girls wrestling movement in high school sports, but his film smartly details the complicated personal lives of its subjects off the mat just as much as it does on. The film isn’t explicitly about the immigrant experience, but the trio of girls just happen to be first-generation Americans living in various areas of New York.
Altschul shows the girls’ struggles not only to excel in the sport, but to gain the acceptance of their family, friends, and the culture at large. The film’s most heartbreaking storyline comes from a girl whose family immigrated from Yemen, and who go so far as to kick her out of the home simply for wanting to play a sport traditionally dominated by men. This is in line with the other characters, whose families come from more traditional backgrounds and believe that a girl’s place is in the home. But it’s encouraging to see so many girls persevere through adversity and acceptance, and it ultimately makes All American a winner.
There’s nothing inherently disagreeable about 2:15 PM, a Korean melodrama from first-time director Seryong Jeong, with a script from Ok-nyeon Park. At times, the film reminded me of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Monster, which also played at Heartland and was one of my favorite films of last year. But what the former lacks is the latter’s ability to dig beneath the surface to offer a message that resonates after the credits end.
Jeong’s film concerns two young girls, played by Park So-yi and Gi So-you, and their budding friendship in the face of adverse circumstances. Hyun-su (Park So-yi) finds Min-ha (Gi So-you) on her way home from school when her father breaks a window in a fit of anger. Seeing someone in need of a friend, she begins a daily ritual of coming to Min-ha’s home and spending their brief window of time together. Jeong does a nice job of inserting drama naturally, like in exploring Min-ha’s father’s abusive behavior, or in Hyun-su’s impending move to Canada. That he manages to achieve all of this within 75 minutes is all the more impressive, but I can’t help but wish there was more to latch onto at the end of the day.
Alonso Ruizpalacios channels Alfonso Cuaron and The Bear with La Cocina, an exquisitely crafted but occasionally stilted drama. The film introduces its conflict early on, setting the stage for a great deal of tension, but it abruptly changes gears in its second half to become a bizarrely ineffective story of immigration. Set over the course of a single day in a generic New York restaurant simply called “The Grill”, the film follows the grunts at the front and back of house as management investigates a large chunk of money that was allegedly stolen the previous night.
All of this serves as the backdrop for the drama between Julia (Rooney Mara), a waitress, and Pedro (Raul Briones), a line cook. She recently discovered she’s pregnant, and he wants to support her decision to get an abortion. Mara and Briones are naturally charismatic together and separately, but the film goes on extended tangents that work perfectly well on paper but grind everything to a halt. One scene shows the kitchen going on a back-and-forth of colorfully insulting each other in their native tongues and, though this is probably La Cocina’s most effective instance of the film’s vision, there are similar scenes that don’t work as well. Still, Ruizpalacios gets the details of life in a busy restaurant right more often than not, like in Luis (Eduardo Olmos), the management underling who appeals to the immigrants by appearing friendly, but secretly has the boss’s best interests at heart. And the film looks incredible, shot in black and white in the Academy aspect ratio. Ruizpalacios especially flexes his muscles behind the camera with a virtuoso minutes-long oner during the chaotic lunch rush, where the lines between reality and fantasy blur. There’s a leaner version of La Cocina that’s undoubtedly much more effective, but it’s hard not to be frustrated by the film as it stands.
No other film at Heartland this year has a logline as hilarious as Stripper Boyz. Serving as a kind of documentary-narrative hybrid, the film tackles male body positivity in an ingeniously inventive way, thanks to the chemistry and instincts of its stars. Stephen Sanow and Jozef Fahey – Stephen is the credited director, and both are credited writers – are long-time friends and struggling actors, and Jozef is engaged, so Stephen decides to throw Jozef a bachelor party. But rather than your typical night of debauchery with friends, the pair travel to Las Vegas, where they try to learn the ropes as male strippers.
The film has a lot of fun with blurring the lines of reality and fiction, as we’re often left wondering how much of what we’re seeing is a bit, versus what is genuine. Stephen’s excuse for embarking on the journey is so that he can give his friend more confidence in himself and in his impending marriage, and Jozef is fully game with what is admittedly a kind of insane idea. If the majority of the conflict within Stripper Boyz was in Jozef’s unwillingness to do what Stephen wants, the film wouldn’t resonate as long as it does. Rather, the conflict comes from outside forces and setbacks beyond their control. Thankfully, the duo have enough comedic chops to make enough worthwhile content without stretching the premise beyond its breaking point.
Gentrification is a word we all know and understand, but Emergent City takes an in-depth look at how and why it happens, in one of the biggest hotbeds for the trend. Documentarians Jay Arthur Sterrenberg and Kelly Anderson dedicate almost 10 years to filming the changes to the neighborhood of Sunset Park, a multi-cultural melting pot near the waterfront of Brooklyn. When the industrial warehouses and factories that flourished in the 1950s were left mostly empty and abandoned, the city tried to invigorate the area by turning the buildings into multi-use facilities called Industrial City, leading to upscale restaurants and businesses like what we see in most downtown areas throughout the country.
Sterrenberg and Anderson take an on-the-ground approach to the film, showing various organizations and town hall meetings, as the community pushes back against further re-zoning and redevelopment. It’s hard not to be won over to the community’s side, but Sterrenberg and Anderson are careful enough to occasionally show the potential upside to more development – like additional jobs and revitalizations to areas that were essentially blights beforehand. It can often feel like an uphill battle whenever community members – especially predominantly non-white community members – fight against a multi-billion dollar company, but Emergent City is an engrossing look at democracy in action, full of colorful personalities worth rooting for.
For four years beginning in 2003, a group of eight artists, art students, and friends ventured to create their own space in the bowels of the Providence Place Mall. Jeremy Workman’s documentary Secret Mall Apartment seeks to tell the nearly unbelievable true story of the apartment, but it quickly morphs into a portrait of how art and creativity can shape a group of people. Michael Townsend, an artist and teacher at RISD, spearheaded the project after discovering a small, undeveloped area within the mall, and he quickly makes it a kind of clubhouse for his friends to share ideas, and also play PlayStation.
It’s amusing how quickly the gang adapts to making the “apartment” their own hidden space. They subsist on food from the food court and popcorn from the movie theater. At one point, they raise the idea of getting a PO Box within the mall, so they can receive mail and make it an official address. But the heart of Secret Mall Apartment is a look at Michael’s belief that art can be anything you make, whether it’s murals of masking tape in a children’s hospital or an ad-hoc apartment with stolen electricity. Michael is an easily likable figure, even when his obsession with the apartment essentially ruins his marriage, so when the inevitable happens and the apartment is discovered, you’re still rooting for him. There isn’t much thematic weight to the film overall, but it’s a good time peppered with humor and insight about the arts, so it ultimately feels like a worthwhile endeavor.
The last gasp of summer is rendered with care and vitality in Jared Isaacs’ An Autumn Summer, a freewheeling look at a group of friends’ gradual realization that things may never be the same, for better and worse. But Isaacs, who writes and directs, rarely injects drama where it doesn’t belong, instead choosing to let his young actors see where the scene takes them. It feels as if they were given mostly free reign to improvise, and it makes this summer getaway in the northern Michigan lakeside feel like a natural extension of their lives and rituals, rather than a film with a predetermined beginning, middle, and end. Though the plot is less important here, it’s centered on Kevin (Mark McKenna) and Cody’s (Lukita Maxwell) romance, as college looms and they fear they could lose everything they have.
Isaacs’ dialogue occasionally feels a little writerly, and perhaps he could have cut the film down from its 98 minute runtime. This is a film where conversations span the gamut from college parties to the Big Bang to dreams of marriage and children, all with abundant theater kid energy. Maxwell and McKenna are the standouts and emotional anchors of the film, but Louise Barnes, Katie Baker, Tony Horton, Julian Bass, and Jun Yu make each of their characters feel distinct, and less like different mouthpieces for Isaacs to use. An Autumn Summer may be Jared Isaacs’ directorial debut, but it’s a supremely confident film that belongs at the top of your Heartland watchlist.
At only 78 minutes, Love, Danielle gets a number of sentiments right about life with cancer, but could stand to expand a bit more on its themes. In the opening minutes of the film, we learn that Danielle (Devin Sidell) has been diagnosed with a BRCA1 genetic mutation, which puts her at higher risk for ovarian and breast cancer. She then has to choose whether she wants to have preventive surgery to remove her breasts and ovaries, in spite of her desire to have children. Given that the film follows Sidell’s real-life experience with BRCA, and her co-screenwriter credit along with Steve Sears, the film feels like an accurate, genuine depiction of those who go through this very unique phenomenon. But as if BRCA wasn’t enough, Danielle’s sister Amy (Jaime King) is going through her own cancer journey, and she has to deal with lingering familial trauma from her absentee father (Barry Bostwick) and her uber-picky mother (Lesley Ann Warren).
First-time director Marianna Palka mostly avoids the quirkiness that comes with the cancer dramedy, instead exploring Danielle’s relationships with her family and loved ones. Sidell is disarmingly vulnerable in her performance, never shying away from the uglier sides of having cancer, and the specific guilt of having a treatable form when someone you love is suffering. More often than not, a film is better served when it doesn’t belabor a plot point or character beat, but here is a case where the film would have benefitted from more room to breathe. Still, Love, Danielle gets the emotions right in a genre where shortcuts are too frequently taken.
The Worlds Divide opens with a title card declaring that the film was entirely drawn and animated by one person, writer-director Denver Jackson. Though it’s almost fully unnecessary, it can be seen as both an excuse for any shortcomings, and a humble-brag for what’s to come. Though the animation is undoubtedly impressive in its intricacies, it still needs some refinement that could have come from at least a second set of eyes. The issues which plagued Jackson’s previous film The Crown of Babylon (which played at Heartland in 2021), mostly the inaccurate lip syncing, continue here, but Jackson still retains his knack for original sci-fi storytelling.
The film concerns Natomi (voiced by Breanna Pearl), who lives in a dystopian dictatorship where no plants or vegetables have grown for ages. She’s transported by her father to a distant world called Esluna, where he’s seen as a kind of god, and various forces try to destroy her. She learns she has unique powers and teams up with a ragtag crew – including a robotic teddy bear – to return her home. Jackson wears his influences on his sleeves, from Star Wars to The Matrix and the films of Studio Ghibli. This, along with an almost punishingly convoluted plot and a nearly 2-hour runtime, makes the film harder to sit through than it should be, but there’s no denying Jackson can craft engaging action set pieces. It’s a miracle for any independent animated film to see the light of day, so it’s even more miraculous for one made from a single person. But that won’t stop me from wishing The Worlds Divide was a more engaging film.
Sometimes an original sci-fi property doesn’t need a crazy, high-concept premise to succeed. Saturn starts with a simple enough hook: a planet suddenly appears in the sky. But director Eric Esau’s film uses this sci-fi backdrop more as a way to explore more dramatic tensions brought to the surface by the unexpected development. The film mostly becomes a weepy familial drama between a man named James (Dominic Bogart), his wife Sarah (Piercey Dalton), and their son George (Elijah Maximus), in the imminent days before the end of the world. Without delving into spoilers, Saturn looks at what it means to be a hero, and the cost of self-sacrifice. We rarely see the planet, so we’re left with its implications, and what regular people would do in the face of unprecedented circumstances.
Esau’s script, which he co-writes with Anna Esau and Douglas Haines, leans into ancient mythology, as we learn that James is a “shepherd”, an ancient being responsible for protecting Earth. So, with the arrival of the planet, he has to choose between saving humanity, or abandoning Earth and escaping with his family to another planet. Even a passing glance at a regional film festival will reveal that low-budget sci-fi can easily lead to embarrassing disaster, so Saturn immediately gains points for not stepping on rakes at every turn. The film looks great, even when it’s as dimly lit as the later seasons of Game of Thrones. Though the meat of the film could stand to be more compelling, it’s hard not to recommend an original idea made with care like this.
You’d think a production featuring the likes of Elizabeth Deschanel and Sam Trammell would feel like more than a micro-budget indie, but such is not the case with the sci-fi dud ReEntry. Remember the plot point in Annihilation where Oscar Isaac inexplicably returns from a void, only to find himself barely functioning as a human or relating to his wife, Natalie Portman? This is essentially the structure for first-time director Brendan Choisnet’s film, working from Daniel Nayeri’s script, but it removes any nuance or menace from the proceedings.
Deschanel plays Elenore, the wife of Lucas (Trammell), a scientist who disappears for a year after going into a portal to another dimension. He returns one year later, and she begins to suspect he’s not who she remembers. Cracks begin to form as she wonders how she can move on, if he’s not the man she’s come to love. Thankfully, without spoiling, Choisnet doesn’t belabor the point until the finale, and the second half provides a sort of interesting rumination on love. It’s just too bad that neither Lucas nor Elenore are terribly interesting as characters, nor do Descanel or Trammell give the kinds of performances that rise above the middling material.
“Do you remember when we had two grocery stores?” It’s an off-handed remark between two nameless citizens of director Joel Fendelman’s titular small town, but it reveals a great deal about its place in the world. North Putman follows a school year in and around the central Indiana school district, popping in and out of all of its various issues, big and small. It’s a fascinatingly complex look at small town life, and the ambitions of its residents. Whether it’s the big topics like a school board meeting discussing DEI initiatives, a kid bringing a knife to school, or something as small as kids telling jokes on a school bus, Fendelman’s camera gives it all equal weight. The film may not be anything revolutionary that wasn’t already explored in films like Frederick Wiseman’s Monrovia, Indiana (which is situated just 30 miles from North Putnam), but it’s an engrossing look at small town life under a microscope.
Indiana lives and breathes basketball, so a documentary like The Waiting Game, which chronicles the American Basketball Association’s retired players fighting for their well-earned pensions is – pardon the pun – a slam dunk. Michael Husain’s feature debut is more traditional in approach, with talking head interviews and Ken Burns-style photo overlays, but it always returns to its subjects and their quest for justice. It’s the kind of documentary that easily provokes, spotlighting the history of the ABA, and how instrumental their players were in the development of the NBA as we know it today. But those players, when the NBA absorbed the ABA, lost the rights to their pension and the healthcare that went with it. Whether you have an encyclopedic knowledge of basketball history, or simply want to learn about a modern David versus Goliath story, The Waiting Game is a confident piece of non-fiction storytelling.
Joy Dietrich’s Attachment Project takes a personal look at adoption, and her long-simmering feelings towards the process and how difficult it can be for both children and adults to adapt. The film follows Joy, and a handful of fellow foreign-born adoptees, who struggled to fit in to their new surroundings when they were kids. What follows is a number of heartbreaking scenes that chronicle their parents often controversial ways of acclimating the kids through a number of difficult methods of therapy that often leave them off worse than the beginning. Dietrich herself goes on her own journey of discovery to reconnect with her adoptive father after a prolonged absence. The film raises a number of introspective questions that adoptees often face: Why did my birth parents abandon me? Am I worthy of being loved? Would my life have been better if I had remained with my birth parents? Attachment Project maybe doesn’t provide universal catharsis with its answers, but it shows a fascinating journey for its subjects nonetheless.
You could probably count the number of meaningful conversations had throughout the entirety of Bloom, on one hand, and that’s not a criticism. Writer and director Mark Totte structures the film as a kind of Malick-esque journey that places heavy emphasis on its visuals and the overall vibes in any given scene. Bloom tells the story of Kate (Kate Braun), a middle-aged grandmother in Milan, Indiana, and her inescapable desire to be free. On a whim, and without a word of warning to her husband, she sets out in her car with her dog Storm and heads west. When she talks to her son Brent, she lies by saying she’s stopped at his place in St. Louis (he’s out of town), and keeps on driving for a destination unknown. Along the way, we see flashbacks to her early, carefree days, touring the country in a van with her musician boyfriend/husband. Totte manages to effectively showcase the feelings at play in the present and past, but the film could have used a little extra narrative push to explain Kate’s sudden emotional turmoil. Still, Bloom doesn’t go for easy sentimentality in the way some micro-indies often do, and it’s all the better for it. In the few dialogue heavy scenes, the words come out naturally, without underlining the themes at play. This is a confident debut, featuring a solid performance from Braun, which will be well worth the price of admission.
You can never really go home again. That’s the enduring sentiment in Hellcat, the film from first-time writer-director Jack Lugar that explores one man’s long-simmering regrets, and how it’s manifested in those around him. Edward Paul Fry stars as Ricky Heller aka “Hellcat”, a musician who left his small town behind to make it big. When he returns back home, he has to come to grips with the life he left behind, and those he left in his wake. Why he forsook his hometown is best left unspoiled, but it touches on a man’s unspoken grief for lost love. The production quality won’t win any Oscars, but worse movies get made for more money every year, and it comes from a place of genuine emotion, which is what counts most at the end of the day.
When non-Hoosiers think of Indiana, they likely consider first the more notable aspects: the Indianapolis 500, our professional sports teams, and our often problematic politics. But what Liminal: Indiana in the Anthropocene explores are the more under-sung features. Entirely shot with drone footage and without any dialogue or talking points, it’s a documentary that forces you to consider newer perspectives on not just Indiana but our relationship with the land in general. The film is divided into various sections by the featured subject matter – one focuses on oil refineries, one focuses on transportation, one on farming, et cetera, and composer Nate Utesch’s score changes with each vignette. It’s a deceptively simple but effective concept for a documentary, and it shows outsiders and Hoosiers alike an idea of Indiana’s modern landscape.
If you want a little star power in your Heartland experience, look no further than Late Bloomers, which stars the one and only Karen Gillan. She stars as Louise, an aimless 28-year old who breaks her hip after an ill-advised drunken trip to an ex’s house. In the hospital, she makes a connection with Antonina (Malgorzata Zajaczkowska), an elderly Polish woman who speaks no English. Their relationship stars off rocky but due to Louise’s perseverance, they strike up an unlikely bond. Gillan navigates Louise’s shifting tones throughout, from youthful naiveté to righteous indignation, and handling the comedic and dramatic beats. First-time director Lisa Steen, working from a script by Amy Greenfield, doesn’t tread new ground narratively speaking, but there’s a warmth to be felt within the film that carries it through. Music plays a big part in Louise and Antonina’s experiences, and the scenes where the characters simply let the music take over rank among the better of the film. I often found myself smiling during these moments, regardless of how predictable the film around it is.
7000 Miles feels similar to Late Bloomers, in that it’s another story of generational understanding, but the former is less successful in execution than the latter. The film follows a young pilot named Jo (Alixzandra Dove) as she returns to her native Hawaii after the death of her grandfather. When her grandmother Meli (Wendie Malick), who essentially raised her, begins having memory issues, Jo begins to discover parts of Meli’s hidden past. Jo also begins reconnecting with a childhood crush who makes her realize she should fight harder to make her dreams a reality. It’s a film that shares a bit with Sweet Home Alabama but also includes a goofily sincere line like “She was the greatest hero of all time!” when referencing Amelia Earhart. Characters are broadly written without ever really investigating them below the surface, and the plot moves in predictable directions from the get-go. Malick and Dove perform amicably together and separately, but there’s a more introspective film to be made about regrets and grief than what’s on display in 7000 Miles. I’ve seen worse films from major film festivals, and that’s about the nicest thing I can muster to say.
Don’t go into New Life expecting a straight-up horror film. Rather, it plays more like an outbreak thriller for most of its runtime. Sure, there are some solid horror moments to be found, but first-time writer and director John Rosman prioritizes the story over the scares. The film follows a game of cat and mouse as Jessica (Hayley Erin) goes on the run through northern America, while Elsa (Sonya Walger), a government fixer, is tasked with bringing her in. What causes the chase is best left unsaid, but Rosman doesn’t overstuff the narrative with unnecessary details. And he throws in some neat visual tricks to liven up the spy chatter when Elsa is on the road. New Life doesn’t necessarily break the mold in the genre, but it shows that Rosman is a voice to look out for.
Below is my conversation with Brooke Berman, writer and director of Ramona at Midlife, ahead of its world premiere at the Heartland International Film Festival. We talk about female friendships, avoiding tropes of the genre, and the evolution of the film from Brooke’s mind to the screen. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Ben Sears: Before you made the film, you had written a number of plays. What was it about this story that you felt would be suitable for a movie?
Brooke Berman: That’s a great question. I had started writing movies earlier when I moved to LA in 2008. I went out there, and I had sold a play to a movie star, and I was getting these writer-for-hire jobs and really learning the form of screenwriting. I’ve always been in love with movie making, but what I realized as a screenwriter in LA is that the part of the process that really lights me up is watching the story move from the page to the actor’s bodies. As a playwright, the writer is involved in that process – we sit in the theater next to the director, and we’re included in all the decision making and all the conversations, and we get to watch the magic happen. And as a screenwriter, that isn’t true. When a screenwriter finishes a draft and they turn it in to their agent, or the studio, or whoever paid for the movie, the screenwriter’s work is then done. And the director takes over and makes the story happen, and I realized that I needed to be in on that. So I made a short while I was living in LA, to see if I had the chops to direct. When we had moved back to New York, I adapted one of my plays, Out of the Water, to film, thinking I was gonna make that for half a million dollars with my friends. I was in development with that movie, and the budget grew to just over a million, and I was in development for six years when the pandemic hit.
So at that point, I had already transferred my imagination from what can happen on the stage to what can happen on camera, and I was training myself to be the person that can direct that, and I had realized I had to do a different story. This story had been living in me for a while – I wrote it for Yvonne Woods, who plays Ramona. She was my classmate at Juilliard, and we were both living in LA at the same time. We had a bunch of conversations about life and love and success, and what it all means. So that character is someone I had been almost nourishing in the dark while I wrote this other story. I sat down and took a writing workshop as a student, and started on day one, and the character showed up. It was different than the story I had planned to write about her, but I wrote the first draft during those first few months between March and August of 2020. And then I just knew I had to make it. Because I had been in development with this other film, doing all the sort of conventional indie things, like attaching an executive producer and a star, and raising tons of money, I was like ‘well, we’re not going to do it that way. Let’s just do it small and simple with what we’ve got.’
BS: How was the story different from what you had planned out?
BB: In Los Angeles, the way that divorce laws work, if you’re a writer and you get divorced, your spouse is entitled to – I’m going to get this wrong, but I used to know it – it has to do with what your spouse is entitled to in compensation for royalties for the work you made during the marriage. It’s meant to protect the wife of the guy who wrote the big movie that made jillions of dollars, but I had a good friend of mine get divorced while I was there, and I was fascinated to learn that little quirk of California divorce law. So that went into the DNA of Ramona, and the first two scenes that came to my mind – one of which is in the movie, and one of which is not – is the scene with the three friends where she says “is this an intervention?” That scene came first. I knew that Ramona had this incredibly successful cohort that she used to be in charge of, and was now hiding from. In my original idea of the story, she was going to ask her friends for help and they didn’t know what to do with her. Also was the idea that she had stopped writing when she got divorced, and would do it out of spite because she was waiting for the time when her ex would no longer be entitled to royalties. Neither of those things really made it into the story; instead what happened when I started writing was that this Ramona was not divorced yet, she was yearning to get back together with her ex who she was still in love with, but she was really stubborn. But those were really the pieces that came first.
BS: You mentioned that you had written this specifically for Yvonne. What was it about her that made her the ideal fit for this part?
BB: Oh, I’m so inspired by Yvonne. Her and Rob Beitzel, who’s the actor that plays Mansbach, were in my final project at Juilliard. I’ve done so many plays with them both, and I always hear their voices in my head. I just love working with them so much, I work with the same actors again and again and again. Yvonne’s real-life husband Brian, who plays the hot dad on the playground, everybody says ‘why isn’t she with him? They have so much chemistry!’ And I say well, they’re married in real life, so actually she really is with him. Everyone in the cast is a friend, so it was really easy to hear those voices in my head. I love actors, and I also really particularly love the way that Yvonne – I know that a lot of the issues in the movie are very close to her heart and mine. So we had a lot of conversations during the development of the film about life and love and marriage and success and Patti Smith. My actors put so much of themselves into the movie, and into the roles.
BS: It feels like there aren’t many movies these days about women in their 30s or 40s, or that period of life, unless it’s something like 80 for Brady. How do you feel about the state of movies for that particular audience these days?
BB: I think we have these really pre-determined ideas about what happens at every decade of a person’s life. And I think that’s true across the genders, but it’s particularly true about women. We’re in a culture where young women start “anti-aging practices” at 28. When I lived in LA, I was shocked to learn they’re Botox-ing in their 20s preemptively, so there’s a terror around getting older, and I think it’s particularly tied to a fear of being obsolete, and a fear of no longer being beautiful, and a fear of no longer having power in the culture. Subsequently, you have a whole bunch of actresses who are terrified for anyone to find out how old they are. So we have no idea how old anybody actually is because you have movies about 40 year old’s being played by 60 year old’s, and the movies about 60 year old’s are being played by 80 year old’s, and everybody just wants to work, which is great – everybody should work. In my own life, I had a baby at 41, and I had two new mom friends was my age, and the other was 26, and we were going through the same thing. I spent my 40s sitting on the playground, like Ramona does, with the moms on the playground benches, just looking for common ground. It totally existed, but it blew my mind how every movie about women in their 40s were about empty-nest syndrome or 80 for Brady, or the movie where the rich ladies go to Sonoma and drink wine. None of that was my life! My life was, I had a job and I had a toddler, and I was at the playground and public school pickup. But I don’t look my age, whatever that means. My husband and I are both writers, we’re both self-employed. There weren’t movies that spoke to me. But I love Nicole Holofcener’s films, I think she really does a good job of addressing middle age for both genders. But most of our friends had our kids later, so I know a lot of people like me, but I don’t see us in the media.
BS: The movies that are in this genre, there’s a number of tropes and plot beats that you almost expect going into it. Ramona at Midlife mostly avoids those – were you cognizant of that when you were going into it, or were you just trying to make something honest without worrying about those plot beats?
BB: Number one, I was definitely trying to make something honest. But number two, which plot beats specifically?
BS: Usually the husband and wife are estranged, and there are whacky shenanigans that they’re involved, and whether they will or will not end up back together by the end of the film.
BB: It’s interesting, that part of the movie, I wish I had more time. We shot the movie in very few days, and I just didn’t have a lot of time with them. But I love that storyline so much because when I realized, when making it, the will-they-won’t-they isn’t really the biggest part of the story. It’s really about her reconciling with who she used to be and who she’s gonna be next. I think it’s so easy in midlife and in a committed relationship, to blame the other person for all of the choices you’ve made or all the things you have or have not become, and both of those spouses have to let the other one off the hook. And he really does it, so then we have to see her do it too. With a bigger budget and a big Hollywood studio behind it, it would’ve turned into a revenge comedy, where the point of the movie was to make that filmmaker eat his words and pay. And that was the least interesting part, for me, because I don’t think he’s the problem. For Ramona, the problem is the way she feels about herself, and if middle-aged women feel invisible, then my god, we have to see ourselves. And that’s what I wanted to explore. I wanted to explore her genuinely seeing herself and being ok with who she is. And that was my goal in the movie, so yes, I wanted to make something honest.
BS: The ending is purposefully ambiguous. Do you have any thoughts about what happens to Ramona after the movie ends?
BB: It’s so funny, my twelve year old son says, mom I don’t think there‘s a sequel. He said ‘I really like it, and I think there’s more to the story, but I don’t think there’s a sequel.’ You know, Ramona is able to make room for herself, so she does not go back to work at the animal shelter, she finds a job that uses her skills as a writer. She does reconcile with her spouse – he’s not going to move back in tomorrow, but they’re gonna patch up their marriage and be together. She does publish – Imani says to her in their scene, that she could write an essay exposing the whole thing. So she does do that, she says ‘in my next essay, where I thoroughly unpack showing up in some guy’s movie.’ She does write that essay, and she does start to put herself – I hate this phrase – but she puts herself out there as a writer, and she’s willing to take life on life’s terms.
BS: That’s all that you can ask for.
BB: I mean, right, what else is there?
BS: Whacky shenanigans abroad?
BB: [laughs] That’s right, she could marry Mr. Big in Paris. And who doesn’t want that? That was a really good episode! But you know what was really important to me, and I didn’t actually realize it until I wrote this movie, is I’m obsessed with female friendship. The more I worked on the movie, during production, and the edit, I could see how much the movie, for me, is about reconciling with old friends. I think the fact that Ramona goes back and says to those friends, sorry if I was a dick. That was really important.
BS: That’s another trope that this movie mostly avoids. Their whole friendship dynamic in other films would be much more heightened, especially the younger mom character.
BB: I love that character. I’ve never actually seen backstabbing in the way that Hollywood tells me to look out for. I’ve seen women who genuinely want the best for each other and struggle with their own shortcomings in the process. But I’ve never had a friend who was like, I really want you to fail.
Shortly after the release of Oppenheimerthis summer, there was a minor stir online about the real-life dangers faced by many Native Americans in the wake of the Trinity test at Los Alamos. Adding to that discussion is the righteously angry documentary Downwind, which focuses on the countless lives that were negatively affected by the US government’s testing of nuclear weapons from 1951 to 1992 in Nevada and Utah. Directors Mark Shapiro and Douglas Brian Miller mine genuine heartbreak and pathos through their interviews with Native American leaders, everyday people that were affected first- and second-hand through radiation sickness and also, uh, Lewis Black. What follows is a mostly comprehensive accounting of the history of the tests, and how their existence was not swept under the rug, but was downplayed in their long-term dangers. The film doesn’t necessarily need any dissenting opinions but it’s what keeps Downwind from being great. Perhaps, at the least, the filmmakers could have included the perspective of someone that worked on the projects, regardless of how supportive they are.
Inspirational sports documentaries are a dime a dozen, but there’s something endearing about the uphill battle on display in 26.2 to Life. Running a marathon is the hardest thing I’ve ever done, physically and mentally, and I did so without the restrictions of the subjects in director Christine Yoo’s debut feature. Nevertheless, the inmates at San Quentin state prison started a running club, with help from outside coaches, volunteering their time regularly to help the men succeed. Throughout the film, we get to know the men at the center of the club, most incarcerated for murder or similarly serious offenses. But they’re determined to improve their lives, and the running club gives them an outlet for success, including one inmate who aims to qualify for the Boston Marathon (trust me, it’s not easy, even for a marathon veteran). The film generally stays the course when it comes to the genre, but Yoo’s access to her subjects is no less impressive. There’s no shortage of emotionally rich stories to be found within the walls of a prison, and 26.2 to Life provides enough life-affirming narratives to make for an engrossing documentary.
With documentaries, less is more. As in, the less information the filmmakers feed to the audience, the more we’ll be able to infer. Case in point: the devastatingly beautiful From This Small Place, a film with sparse dialogue but an abundance of heart. The film follows a family of Rohingya refugees as they settle in their new lives in a Bangladeshi camp. Director Taimi Arvidson smartly juxtaposes the kids’ carefree days spent playing and exploring with the adults’ worries about the basic necessities of life, all without narration, letting the images speak for themselves. It’s a documentary that manages to be poignant and fulfilling, without being overly sentimental. And at only 77 minutes, it says what it needs to say without wearing out its welcome.
Below is my conversation with the cast and crew of To Fall in Love, which includes director Michael Foster, writer Jennifer Lane, and actors Eric Cassalini and Beth Gallagher, ahead of its world premiere at the Heartland International Film Festival. We talk about adapting the original play into a film, the challenges of filming extensive dialogue, and Beth & Eric’s ability to channel their characters’ grief. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Ben Sears: You all have some familiarity with each other from working on different projects together. Did that familiarity and chemistry help out with any part of the process?
Beth Gallagher: It certainly helped with trust, like artistic trust. Michael, had we worked together before?
Michael Foster: Yes, we worked on the trailer, we worked on the first iteration, and that was pretty much it.
BG: Jenny and Eric and I had worked worked on the play together, Eric and I had worked on other plays together. Michael and I had worked on the trailer for the play, and a first iteration of the film together, so there wasn’t any – for me – any feeling of ‘oh, is this person going to get my work?’ It just kind of happened nicely, and I don’t have anything to compare it to, but it felt great.
Eric Cassalini: Yea, I would make the similar statement that the issue of whether we were going to accomplish our goals or not was nothing that ever got in the way of production.
BS: It’s always easier to work with people you know than someone you’re just meeting for the first time.
MF: From my point of view, working with the people in this room, was definitely not an issue, especially with Beth and Eric. A lot of the takes, I could just let them go, knowing that they had done the play and the previous movie, and they knew their lines and their characters. But I haven’t even thought about this until now, but I had never worked with the crew before. We only shot for 5 days, but it took me a couple of days to learn how to communicate with them. I’m kind of having some PTSD right now [laughs] because the first day was not easy. There was definitely some communication issues happening, like wrong lenses being rented, the wrong camera was rented; there were some things going on. Then I found out the crew was really loyal to the DP [], and so they weren’t really going to take my direction without going through her, so there were some weird things going on that first day, but I think by the second or third day we got things figured out.
BG: Well as a producer, I would have loved to help, but as an actor, I’m so glad that Michael had the capacity to keep that from us.
MF: Beth needed to focus on the acting, which is where I needed her. But it was not ideal for her to be producing while acting.
BG: Well I think you did a great job of allowing us to separate those two because you can’t be speaking up about the wrong lens during the take.
MF: [Laughs] You guys don’t even know about half the behind the scenes stories.
BS: You had mentioned the play a little bit. Jenny, at what point did you decide to adapt your play into a film?
Jennifer Lane: That’s a great question, I think it was Michael’s idea, at least initially. He heard a reading and then was like ‘this could be a movie.’
MF: It was actually the second reading, the first reading really, really moved me. But there was something about the second reading when Jenny had revised it a little bit – and I think it had to do with Eric and Beth being more into character. I don’t know what happened, but all I know is that by halfway through the second reading, I had visuals in my head and I was thinking of Before Sunrise, and that trilogy, and I think after the reading I was moved, and said ‘this should be a movie,’ and then we all got excited.
JL: That’s exactly what happened, and at that point, do you guys remember how far into development we were?
EC: I don’t think we were that far at all. We only did five rehearsals before the first performance, which is insane. It was well before we actually mounted it the first time, which was at the 2017 San Diego Fringe Festival. Michael had already expressed his interest, and we were like, ‘yea, let’s figure out how to get this thing done.’ It all kind of bubbled up together once we started working on a production. Jenny brought it to me a year before.
JL: That’s another interesting tidbit, I had written the part of Wyatt for Eric. We had been working on a different play a year before, and as I was working on this play, it was his voice in my head as I was creating it. He was the first person I showed it to.
EC: Yea, and then we had built it into the Fringe for the following season, and then it just started gathering. Michael was the only filmmaker that I was psyched to be working with at the time. There was only one other person I had worked with before him, and they weren’t really making films at that point anyway. His interest made it such an obvious thing.
BS: It sounds like most of you have a mostly theatre-based background. Was it difficult at all to make that transition to film?
BG: For me, it was not difficult because the way we did the play at Fringe was in small rooms, and then we did it site-specific twice. That is so close to on-camera acting. What was different, and is always different about film, is filming out of sequence. But Michael allowed us to go back as far as we wanted, sometimes, I want to say, about 10 minutes, and ramp up into the scene that he was actually trying to capture. That made a world of difference. I think that’s why the performances are decent because he didn’t just make us go. All of that made it not difficult for me.
EC: I agree, it really, as far as the aesthetic, it didn’t feel very different. In part because we had done it as a site-specific play a couple times, so the reality of it was very much baked into our process of learning it as actors. Yes, it was in a different location, but it was still a house. We didn’t have to imagine being in a different space. All of that leant itself to being able to transition our experience into a different location. There are moments on stage, even in a close setting, when I personally feel like I need to project more in the moment. So the process of switching over to a film leant itself to the intimacy of the story.
BG: It’s like doing a site-specific show, but the audience is holding a boom mic.
EC: Or like one of those satellite dishes, from the football field.
BS: Michael, the technique that Beth had mentioned of performing a scene before what you’re actually filming – how did you get to that process?
MF: I don’t think I came up with that, I think Beth and Eric did. One of our earliest takes, one of them said ‘can we start earlier?’ And I was like, sure, we’re not shooting on film, so the only thing we’re dealing with is time. We had plenty of time on each day, but it was never a problem. Since we were doing long takes, it just made sense to me that since we’re doing these long takes, that they’d be able to ramp into it. My personal feeling is that the actors are the ones on camera, and they’re the ones that people are watching, so I was more than happy to go with whatever process they wanted to go with.
BS: This is a film that’s almost exclusively dialogue. Were there any specific challenges to filming so much dialogue and still making it dynamic?
MF: The biggest challenge was the technical part of it. Once we worked with Eric and Beth, blocking the scene how we wanted, that was the easy part. The hard part was figuring out where the camera and the crew were gonna be. Because the camera was kind of floating or moving in some scenes, so the hardest part was getting all of that worked out. We didn’t do that many takes per scene, but when we did have to do a second or third take, usually it was for a technical reason, like something going out of focus for too long. And I’m ok with those things, but it was always technical, it was never performance related.
JL: I think I was more sensitive to that in some ways, just because I really wanted it to not feel like we were just filming a play, and I don’t have as much experience in screenwriting as I do in playwriting. So I was like, ok, does it feel too stagnant? Where can we cut back on dialogue just a little, and let it just be a physical reaction or something. I was very sensitive to it, maybe I worried too much about it. But I was very cognizant of the fact that this needed to be different in some meaningful way.
EC: And the rest of us were like, ‘put in a transition! We want more dialogue!’ Because dialogue is so fun, and that actually happens multiple times.
BG: In the pre-production process we did go from one location to five, and that came from a combination of Michael and Jenny saying what’s realistic and dynamic enough. Michael also edited the film, and that’s a huge part of what makes it dynamic.
EC: In fact, there was a process there, with the opening sequence. You did it one way, and made some changes to make it more dynamic.
MF: My original intention was to shoot it wide-screen, almost like looking at it straight on, as if it were on a stage but on the real world. That was kind of the original idea behind it, and I shot the opening scene in a master, but we did a lot of coverage. But in the editing process, I thought I would stick to my original idea, which was to let it play out in one long take. And we screened it for friends, and nobody liked it, so I had to go back and edit it like a movie, with all the different cuts and cutting back and forth to reactions. After I did that, I haven’t had a single person say that it doesn’t work.
BS: There are so many movies that are play adaptations, and it’s a common technique to throw in a flashback or something to expand the world that can’t be done on stage. Was there ever a moment when you considered doing that?
JL: I think that I probably wanted to go overboard on stuff like that, and Michael was the one to reign me in. Like I said, I was just very sensitive to the fact that it was a play, and I didn’t want it to feel sluggish. I was very concerned about that, and fortunately he talked some sense into me. So the only time we use any sort of flashback is to great effect.
MF: I just felt that if you peppered in some flashbacks, the ending would have less impact. It’s like not showing the shark, so when you finally see the shark, it’s more impactful. I felt like the audience had gotten used to seeing everything in real time, and then all of a sudden they’re seeing a different type of imagery, then it would be a little more impactful.
BS: Beth and Eric, was it difficult at all to tap into this very specific type of grief that your characters have experienced?
BG: Yes, difficult to know that it’s authentic to someone that has actually experienced it. But no, not difficult to authentically feel grief or sadness or pain or love. To me, the greatest compliment is when someone sees it and says ‘I lost my child, and you portrayed what I experienced authentically.’ I also will never stop saying ‘oh, that’s how I should have said that line.’ It’s never done right, you never get it exactly perfect.
JL: To their credit, I’ve seen them do this many times, and it feels fresh and authentic every single time I see them do it. Whether it’s the film, or a million different versions of the play. I wrote it, and I’m like ‘oh, this is really exciting to watch!’ Because they’re incredible to watch every single time.
EC: I’m the lucky one in this story, because my grief is sitting in front of my the whole time. So all I have to do is rely on my training as an actor to put all my attention on my partner, and get stuff from her, and try to do stuff to her. Part of the reason it ends up fresh is because we’re both really in a moment together when things are working. We’re just following each other’s lead. It’s not so much about what we say as it is how we say it. For my part, it wasn’t so much about the loss of my son. Nobody can play more than one thing at a time because nobody does that in real life. It’s like, you don’t understand, that’s what happens in reality. So I didn’t have to think so much about Jake, except in the moments when we’re talking about him, and then it’s just a matter of connecting to loss. And then it doesn’t really matter what kind of loss you’ve experienced in your life, as long as you know the level of loss. That’s like a 10, so I just had to go find in my imagination, the places where I could connect to that, and then just talk to her. It is a challenge, but it’s a challenge that I’ve been working on building as a craft for 10 years. I’m lucky to have a partner with Beth; she made it really easy.
