Chattanooga Film Festival: Giving Birth to a Butterfly (2021)
Mirna Loy once wrote: “We might have coupled In the bed-ridden monopoly of a moment Or broken flesh with one another At the profane communion table Where wine is spilled on promiscuous lips We might have given birth to a butterfly With the daily news Printed in blood on its wings.” She also once wrote […]
Chattanooga Film Festival: LandLocked (2021)
Are the movies trying to tell me something? I’ve watched multiple films in the last few weeks where people try to go back home again and set things right. This never works out. What am I to learn? Directed and written by Paul Owens, LandLocked brings his family into the film, playing fictionalized versions of themselves, […]
Chattanooga Film Festival: The Ones You Didn’t Burn (2022)
I’ve said it before, I’ll certainly say it again, but if your parent — who you have been estranged from — calls you repeatedly with strange messages and then they die and you need to set their affairs in order, just stay away. You don’t need the money, the aggravation or the supernatural onslaught. Nathan […]
Chattanooga Film Festival: Chicken House (2022)
Director and writer Cate Jones — she also made She’s the Eldest — comes from Lawton, Oklahoma, known — as her IMDB bio helpfully reminds us — for high crime, meth and an Army base. She left town as soon as she graduated and now makes movies. She’s also Cat, the new roommate in a house of […]
Chattanooga Film Festival: Dawn Breaks Behind the Eyes (2021)
Director Kevin Kopacka and co-writer Lili Villányi worked on an episode of the TV show DYLAN a few years ago, which is based on the same character from Cemetery Man. That makes perfect sense, as this film has style to spare. Dieter (Frederik von Lüttichau) and Margot (Luisa Taraz) have moved to a Gothic castle that would […]
Chattanooga Film Festival: The Leech (2022)
Father David (Graham Skipper, the director of Sequence Break) is a devout priest who has never missed a Mass, never eaten meat on a Good Friday and never misses the opportunity to speak on God’s love, including when he invites Terry (Jeremy Gardner, the director of After Midnight and the man who told his mother not to […]
Chattanooga Film Festival: Bitch Ass (2022)
When a movie starts with Tony Todd asking if you know your hood horror, then name drops Blacula, Bones, Tales from the Hood, The People Under the Stairs and Candyman, it has a lot to live up to. Luckily, Bitch Ass more than succeeds. Director Bill Posely, who started his career as an actor before writing episodes of Cobra Kai and directing several […]
Chattanooga Film Festival: A Pure Place (2021)
Irina (Greta Bohacek) and her brother Paul (Claude Heinrich) are Firstlings, the young members of a cult based around an upper caste that strives to remain pure and clean, while its opposite lower members are devoted to making soap, herding pigs and living in darkness and filth. All decisions are made by Fust (Sam Louwyck), who has set […]
Chattanooga Film Festival: Ming kiyal (1000 Nights) (2021)
There’s a quote at the start of this movie that was so great that I wrote it down: “True love is wild and sad. This is the thrill of two beings in the darkness.” Director Marat Sarulu, who co-wrote this movie with Emil Jumabaev, also made Move, Songs from the Southern Seas and The Rough River, the Placid […]
Chattanooga Film Festival: The Timekeepers of Eternity (2021)
The Langoliers may be at the bottom of Stephen King adaptions, but if The Timekeepers of Eternity has any say in things, we’ve been misjudging Tom Holland’s 1995 TV miniseries. Animator Aristotelis Maragkos has printed every frame of that movie and used collage animation to reconstruct, remix and retell the story in an entirely new way, […]
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