Lukas Armstrong-Laird reports from Baltimore’s hottest indie film fest
The best weekend of the year came and went. It started Thursday night at Fadensonnen, where filmmakers gathered to socialize and drink before the New/Next Film Festival officially kicked off. I arrived straight from work, and the courtyard’s bustling energy hit me like a brick, jolting me from the daze of a long day. It was immediately overstimulating, and I felt out of place: I didn’t have a film in the festival, and I had my backpack on. That is to say, no tote bag.
One of the first people I met was filmmaker Elias ZX, who handed me a zine—their so-called “Extremely Biased Guide to New/Next”—which detailed three short films they were involved with. It was one of the many examples of out-of-the-box marketing I saw during the weekend (I collected buttons, stickers, postcards, and even a bookmark), and I respected the hustle. I caught all three films, and what struck me most was the aesthetic diversity amongst them: Michael Bernieri’s The Deliveryboy was a “classically shot” narrative about a stoner who returns to his hometown in the wake of his brother’s death and runs into a stranger from his past; Elias ZX’s 1-Day Adult was an experimental documentary shot entirely on a 360-degree camera during a trip to Singapore, effectively turning the tourist experience into an isolating and existential mindwarp; and Paul Oh’s Jenes Flowers was a desktop film, using screen recordings of Google Maps to depict a person’s discovery of ghost businesses during a struggle to buy last-minute flowers.
Read full article: NEW/NEXT 3.0 – BRUISER
