Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Stay the Same Never Change


Apparently the posts I've done up until now for the Mar del Plata Film Festival have all been for the Film Festival in 2007. So, um, disregard. New posts will be from this year's festival, I promise.

Showing at the 2009 Mar del Plata Film Festival: Stay the Same Never Change, directed by Laurel Nakadate

Synopsis from the festival's website:

Visual artist Laurel Nakadate didn’t need a story line or a plot or anything similar to make her first film one of the biggest surprises of the last edition of the Sundance Festival. Instead, she filmed a group of girls from the suburbs of Kansas City in their real homes, dressed in the clothes they usually wear and living (so to speak, unless you think boys in the Middle West have a black digital rectangle over their eyes) the lives they live. The result is like an absorbing and odd photo album; a harsh look on adolescence, its long days full of boredom, awkwardness, loneliness and hard and contradictory romances. “I hate myself…I am an optimist person”, says one of these girls who, accompanied by Owen Ashworth´s lo-fi music (whose alias, “Casiotone for the Painfully Alone”, is very significant), act as themselves in the sometimes languid and sometimes horrifying beautiful vignettes in Stay The Same Never Change. Like The Virgin Suicides without a story, left only with the rarefied mood of Eugenides´ novel (with a sometimes innocent and sometimes perversely voyeuristic viewpoint), Nakadate captures the dramatic banality and vague anguish of the teenage hearts at the core of the United States.

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