Florida Film Festival 2014 - Day 2 & 3

Dispatches from this year's Florida Film Festival

Nature in some ways seemed to be the theme connecting my first two movies of the fest. The title of the first, Druid Peak, refers to an area in rural Wyoming populated by wild wolves, a population maintained and monitored by dedicated scientists and naturalists. But this isn't a nature doc. The story begins with Owen, an apathetic high school student living in a small, working class town--the kind of town, frankly, you see in one too many of these microbudget films. Thankfully, Marni Zelnick's story (which she also directed) leaves this oft-looked at setting when after a tragic night that sees one of his friends killed in a car accident, Owen's mother sends him off to Wyoming to be with the father he's never met.

You could say what transpires is coming-of-age, as Owen slowly, but enthusiastically learns his father's craft of tracking and protecting these wild packs. Certainly, if there are cliches, it exists in Zelnick's dialogue, which at times very heavy-handedly drives home the parallels between wolves and man, such as when Everett suggests to Owen that all creatures have depths unrealized--even human beings (!). It's unnecessary.

But everything else works superbly. The drabness of Owen's home life is contrasted by Zelnick and cinematographer Rachel Morrison beautifully rendered Wyoming countryside. The grays, blacks, and dark blues of Owen's wardrobe slowly morph into an earthier yellow; the garishness of the neon blue laces on one (yes just one) of his sneakers become an appropriately brown work boot.

The movie, outside of a couple of more heartwrenchingly dramatic scenes, are a series of small moments: Owen falling asleep in the woods under the watchful eye of one of his beloved Druids, Everett's realization that his son has a crush on a local farmer's daughter, the dual tracking shot of Owen running along with several wolves he's finally been able to track down.

Judith Lit's documentary After Winter, Spring takes a more explicit look at being one with nature. Framed as a sort of memoir, Lit's movie starts off seeming like the story of an ex-pat who decided to buy a farm in the French countryside, but then turns into almost an ethnography of a very small and particular culture of family farms. As she explores the lives and hardships of several of her neighbors and their struggles to keep the ways of life generations before them ongoing, the theme each of them seem to come back to is how imperative it is to lead a life in some way attached, in a very tactile way, to the earth that sustains them.

The Shorts #2 Program was generally a pretty strong one. Kush, about the paranoia in India immediately after the assassination of Indira Gandhi, is a powerful exploration of both religious intolerance and personal perseverance. Fortune House, in a hilarious reveal at it's end, shows the lengths people will go for true(-ish) love. And a handful of criminals and hapless would-be criminals are at the mercy of a little girl when they botch a kidnap-for-ransom attempt in Penny Dreadful.

The night ended relatively disappointingly, with Crimes Against Humanity and the Midnight Shorts program. The former was a generally unfunny comedy dealing with either very mean or very stupid people. Conceptually the movie had promise and was not without its funny moments, but I felt like it would've been better as a sketch or a short and, like its characters, stretched out to a feature begins to test one's patience. I'll admit that a long day did not benefit me seeing the Midnight Shorts this year but, despite a few gems, particularly Whispers and Jack Attack, this year's program lacked any real shock value or punch I expect from all of the midnight screenings.

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Sunday began with the best narrative feature I've seen so far, Eddie Mullins's Doomsdays, following a couple of wanderers who go around searching for empty houses to break into and squat in until they need (or, more accurately, are forced) to run and find new accommodations. Things get complicated when two others, a teen and restless woman, end up joining the crew. Maybe because it only recently came out, I often thought of this as a shaggier younger cousin of Sofia Coppola's The Bling Ring. Mullins's camera likes to linger far from some of the proceedings (which again reminded me of that great Harry Savides shot in The Bling Ring that watched the raid of Audrina Patridge's house), observing a character breaking into a house in the background, while the others watch in the foreground. In fact, I can hardly remember any standard over the shoulder, shot/reverse shots. Instead, Mullins traps his characters in single shots, emphasizing how bound they are to each other though their relationships seem to be steadily tearing at the seams.

Shorts Program 3 was another solid program, most of which were darkly comic, particularly the finale, Rat Pack Rat, about a Sammy Davis Jr impersonator who is forced to do a show under, well, extreme circumstances. It's dark and disturbing, queasily funny. And the one thing I wondered after the fact is why it wasn't part of the Midnight Shorts program!