Cinequest

Best of Cinequest

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Photo caption: Jennifer Levinson in TRUST. World premiere at Cinequest. Courtesy of Menemsha Films.

After a pandemic-driven hiatus, Cinequest returns in-person for the first time since March 2020. Beginning on August 16, this year’s festival will be live at downtown San Jose’s California Theatre, Hammer Theater and 3Below. On August 25, the program moves to Campbell’s Pruneyard Cinemas through August 29.

I’ve already seen almost twenty offerings from Cinequest 2020, and here are my initial recommendations. As usual, I focus on the world and US premieres. Follow the links for full reviews, images and trailers. I’ve also included some tips for making the most of the Cinequest experience under “Hacking Cinequest”.

MUST SEE

This year’s festival Must Sees are the first features from three female filmmakers: writer/actor/producer Jennifer Levinson with Trust, documentarian Nira Burstein with Charm Circle and co-writer/actor Elizabeth Hirsch-Tauber with 12 Months.

  • Trust: Writer-actor Jennifer Levinson’s absorbing exploration of family betrayal must be the best screenplay at Cinequest. Kate (Levinson) is rocking her college experience when her mother unexpectedly dies. Kate returns to her hometown for the funeral, and apprehensively re-engages with her estranged family. They just might cringe their way through the funeral until an estate planning blunder explodes. Often darkly hilarious, Trust is elevated by Levinson’s textured characters. Kate’s strait-laced, conflict-averse brother is clinging onto functionality by his fingernails. The oldest sister is a flamboyant hot mess, but her astonishingly bad behavior seems to stem from some undiagnosed disorder. Their nogoodnik of a father hides a profound weakness and desperation behind his sleazy gloss. Kate herself has the decency that evades her nuclear family, but she’s immature and too prickly. How will Kate find closure when she has no control over the motives of the others? World premiere. Trailer at bottom of this post.
  • Charm Circle: You think YOUR family has issues? In this superbly structured film, writer-director Nira Burstein exquisitely unspools the story of her own bizarre family, a cautionary and ever-surprising chronicle of mental illness. Bay Area premiere.
  • 12 Months: This uncommonly authentic film traces the year-long span of a romance, using vignettes that are snapshots of the relationship’s evolution. Just like a real life relationship, 12 Months has moments that are playful and moments that are searing. 12 Months is entirely improvised by its director and its stars, who are extremely keen and perceptive observers of relationship behavior, and they don’t hit a single wrong note. World premiere.

INTERNATIONAL CINEMA

Lidia Vitale and Ludovica Mancini in Gabriele Fabbro’s THE GRAND BOLERO at Cinequest. Courtesy of Cinequest.
  • The Grand Bolero: Early in COVID’s devastating assault on Northern Italy, a middle-aged organ restorer is locked down in a centuries-old church; a salty curmudgeon, she cruelly resists the assistant forced upon her – a runaway young mute woman with no place else to shelter. But the young woman’s unexpected musical gift unlocks passion in the older woman. Passion evolves into obsession, propelling the story to an operatic finale. The Grand Bolero is the most visually beautiful film that I’ve seen in some time, and the music is powerfully evocative. It’s a remarkable first feature for director, co-writer and editor Gabriele Fabbro and his cinematographer Jessica La Malfa. Bay Area premiere.

DOCUMENTARY

Charlie Morgan in OUT IN THE RING. Courtesy of Ryan Bruce Levey.
  • Out in the Ring is Ryan Bruce Levey’s encyclopedic yet irresistible history of LGBTQ professional wrestlers. Out in the Ring chronicles straight wrestlers like Gorgeous George who pretended to be gay, and the many gay wrestling stars like Pat Patterson who were forced to stay in the closet. It’s also a showcase for today’s panoply of queer wrestling stars. Both unflinching and uplifting. World premiere.
  • Tell Me a Memory is a simple, yet engrossing, LGBTQ+ oral history. One or two at a time, individuals from Memphis (did you know they call themselves Memphians?) tell their own stories. The subjects are impressively diverse – in age, gender, race and identity. Coming Out in the Bible Belt is a common thread. This is a gentle and emotionally powerful film. World premiere.

AND TWO I HAVEN’T YET SEEN

Jim Gaffigan and Rhea Seehorn in LINOLEUM. Courtesy of Blue Fox Entertainment.

Of the Cinequest films that I haven’t been able to screen yet, the most favorable buzz comes from Linoleum, the Jim Gaffigan science comedy that opens the festival, and the political satire Land of Dreams. Both have distributors – they’ll be in theaters, but you can see them early at Cinequest.

HACKING CINEQUEST

Cinequest recovers its Downtown San Jose vibe, with concurrent screenings at the 1122-seat California, the 550-seat Hammer and the 257-seat 3Below – all within 1600 feet of each other. This year’s beer garden is across the street from the California.

At Cinequest, you can get a festival pass for as little as $179, and you can get individual tickets as well. Take a look at the entire program, the schedule and the passes and tickets.

As usual, I’ll be covering Cinequest rigorously with features and movie recommendations. I usually screen (and write about) over thirty films from around the world. Bookmark my CINEQUEST page, with links to all my coverage.  Follow me on Twitter for the latest. And here’s the trailer for Trust.

Laughs at Cinequest

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Peter S. Kim, Ally Maki and Hayden Szeto in DEALING WITH DAD. Courtesy of Cinequest.

Comedies abound at this year’s Cinequest. Here are four:

  • Dealing with Dad is a topical family comedy with an Asian-American cast. Three adult siblings – the super-achiever oldest sister, the passive middle brother and the infantilized youngest brother, a gaming slacker – meet at their parents’ home. The dad, whose harsh and never-bending expectations battered them as kids, has become paralyzed (and defanged) by severe depression. Their differences spawn lots of laughs, but Dealing with Dad addresses both depression and the issues that many second-generation Asian-Americans face because of their immigrant parents’ parenting styles. Cinequest audiences will appreciate that Dealing with Dad is set in MILPITAS.
  • 18 1/2 is a dark comedy that sends up the paranoid thriller genre. A low-level government clerical worker (an excellent Willa Fitzgerald) finds herself in possession of the infamous 18 1/2 minute gap in the Watergate Tapes. Of course, co-writers Daniel Moya and Dan Mirvish had to devise a way to get this MacGuffin in her hands; given the paranoia, deviousness and clumsiness of the Nixon White House, their solution is surprisingly plausible. Double crosses and red herrings escalate, as does the dark, dark humor. Richard Kind and Vondie Curtis-Hall sparkle in supporting roles.
  • Sweet Disaster, from Germany, is driven by the protagonist’s ever-unleashed impulsiveness and utter lack of boundaries. Frida (Friederike Kempter) encounters and falls for an airline pilot and audaciously charms him into a relationship; their affair lasts just long enough for her to become impregnated and for him to abandon her for his ex. Consumed by the urge to win him back, Frida throws propriety to the winds. Frida’s zany roller coaster is tempered by sweet relationships with her apartment neighbors, a precocious teenage neighbor and a Greek Chorus of card-playing older women.
  • Alpha Male, from Poland, is another dark comedy. A feckless young man has been dispatched by his girlfriend to a smoking cessation self-help group. Given the chaos of the community center, he ends up in the wrong room, among a men’s support group headed by a charismatic instructor. He hangs around anyway – and even returns – because this group has better food. The group focuses on their resentment of women, which seems silly and harmless at first, but descends into a paranoid fixation on an imagined organization of women seeking to emasculate them. Both the misogyny and their submissiveness to their bullying leader are taken to absurd levels.

Here’s the Cinequest program, the schedule and the passes and tickets. My CINEQUEST page links to all my coverage. 

Vondie Curtis-Hall, John Magaro, Willa Fitzgerald and Catharine Curtin in 18 1/2. Credit Elle Schneider (c)2021, Waterbug Eater Films, LLC.

OUT IN THE RING: macho and flamboyant, wrestling is also queer

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Charlie Morgan in OUT IN THE RING. Courtesy of Ryan Bruce Levey.

Out in the Ring is Ryan Bruce Levey’s encyclopedic yet irresistible documentary history of LGBTQ professional wrestlers. There is no sports entertainment that is more macho than pro wrestling. Or more flamboyant. Or, as it turns out, more queer.

Out in the Ring takes us back to the 1940s, when the straight journeyman wrestler Gorgeous George became a star and transformed wrestling by affecting a gay pose as his gimmick. George was just the first to do so, and Out in the Ring traces the many straight wrestlers who have pretended to be gay.

At the same time, many of wrestling’s best performers were closeted, notably the great Pat Patterson. Out in the Ring focuses on Patterson’s career and personal life, and how he grew into an important executive in the business. Out in the Ring surveys a long list of LGBTQ wrestlers who were forced to stay in the closet, like Patterson and Susan Tex Green.

[Personal note: The Movie Gourmet is a Boomer who, as a child, was glued to the TV for KTVU’s Saturday pro wrestling broadcasts, announced by Walt Harris. (Harris also called also roller derby.) In that era, Pat Patterson was a dominant presence in Bay Area pro wrestling.]

Out in the Ring showcases the panoply of today’s Out wrestling stars, led by Charlie Morgan and Mike Parrow. The variety is astounding: gay men, lesbians, bisexual women and men, transsexual men and transsexual women, asexual and nonbinary. There are those who make their queerness a signature of their act and those that don’t. They tell us about the homophobia that they have faced and their relief and joy from coming out.

Ry Levey has brought many films to Cinequest as a publicist, especially Canadian indies. The exquisitely sourced Out in the Ring is his first feature as a director.

I screened Out in the Ring for its US premiere at Cinequest. Both unflinching and uplifting, it’s a documentary as fun to watch as pro wrestling.

CHARM CIRCLE: you think YOUR family has issues?

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Raya Burstein and Uri Burstein in CHARM CIRCLE. Photo courtesy of Cinequest.

In the superbly structured documentary Charm Circle, writer-director Nira Burstein exquisitely unspools the story of her own bizarre family. At first, we meet Burstein’s father, a sour character who inexplicably is about to lose his rented house, which has become unkempt, even filthy. He is mean to Burstein’s apparently sweet and extraordinarily passive mother, and the scene just seems unpleasant.

But then, Nira Burstein brings out twenty-year-old videos that show her dad as witty, talented and functional. We learn a key fact about the mom, and then about each of the director’s two sisters.

Some of the publicity about Charm Circle describes the family as eccentric, but only one daughter is a little odd – three family members are clinically diagnosable. Charm Circle is a cautionary story of untreated mental illness and the consequences of failing to reach out for help.

This is Nira Burstein’s first feature, and she has two things going for her: unlimited access to the subjects and a remarkable gift for storytelling. Charm Circle works so well because of how Burstein sequences the rollout of each family member’s story.

I attended a screening of Charm Circle, with a Nira Burstein Q&A at the Nashville Film Festival. In July and August, it will play both the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival and Cinequest.

18 1/2: the paranoid thriller meets the darkly silly

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Photo caption: Willa Fitzgerald in 18 1/2. Credit Elle Schneider (c)2021, Waterbug Eater Films, LLC.

In 18 1/2, a dark comedy that sends up the paranoid thriller genre, we’re back in the vortex of the 1973-74 Watergate scandal. A low-level government clerical worker (an excellent Willa Fitzgerald) finds herself in possession of the infamous 18 1/2 minute gap in the Watergate Tapes. She’s trying to find the best way to leak it to the press. Double crosses and red herrings escalate, as does the dark, dark humor. The paranoia finally morphs into over-the-top horror movie silliness and a neo-noir epilogue.

Of course, co-writers Daniel Moya and Dan Mirvish (who directed 18 1/2) had to devise a way to get this notorious MacGuffin into her hands; given the paranoia, deviousness and clumsiness of the Nixon White House, their solution is surprisingly plausible. I am a Watergate buff, and their device passed my smell test.

To review American scandal history, the 18 1/2 minute gap was a national obsession between November 1973 and August 1974. Investigators had subpoenaed the tape recordings of various Oval Office conversations, seeking evidence of White House involvement in the Watergate burglary or its coverup. The tape of a key Nixon conversation showed up with 18 1/2 minutes in the middle ERASED. The presumption was that the content of the gap was highly incriminating, and it was very likely that Nixon himself, or someone acting at his direction, obstructed justice by erasing the tape. The White House explanation, that Nixon’s secretary Rose Mary Woods had contorted her body to accidentally erase the tape, was laughable. When another tape, the “Smoking Gun”, came to light in August 1974, Nixon was forced to resign.

Willa Fitzgerald is very good as the somberly earnest protagonist. Her sudden burst of lust signals 18 1/2‘s shift into pedal-to-the-medal parody

Vondie Curtis-Hall, John Magaro, Willa Fitzgerald and Catharine Curtin in 18 1/2. Credit Elle Schneider (c)2021, Waterbug Eater Films, LLC.xxx

Two of my favorite character actors, Richard Kind and Vondie Curtis-Hall sparkle in supporting roles.

Kind plays the operator of a remote motel, just enough of an eccentric oddball to make the audience think he may be unhinged. You’ll recognize Richard Kind, a reliable character actor and voice artist with 263 screen credits. My favorite Richard Kind performance was the moving portrayal of a man seeking closure after the death of his wife in Clint Eastwood’s Hereafter. I also love his recent lead role in Auggie.

Curtis-Hall gets to bypass unhinged on his way to monstrous. He and Catharine Curtin play an older couple of relentless sociability. The revelation of his true character is the keystone to the parody. BTW not many actors have been in as many good movies as has Curtis-Hall: Mystery Train, Passion Fish, Crooklyn, Gridlock’d, Eve’s Bayou, Honeydripper, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, Blue Bayou.

I screened 18 1/2 earlier this year at Cinequest, where it was the Opening Night film 18 1/2 opens in theaters this weekend, including at Laemmle’s Monica Film Center and soon the Glendale and the NoHo 7.

BUY ME A GUN: children in the narcopolypse

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BUY ME A GUN. Photo courtesy of Cinequest.

Tp honor Cinequest, now underway, here’s the best of the over thirty films that I reviewed at the 2019 Cinequest. The searing dystopian fable Buy Me a Gun takes place in an imaginary near future, in which Mexico’s conquest by narco cartels is so complete that all other institutions have collapsed.

Buy Me a Gun’s Mexico is a bandit society run by rival warlords and their fighters – a new feudal age with automatic weapons.  It’s a world of cruelty, where all the mothers and teen daughters have been taken by the cartels as sex slaves. And it’s a surreal Mexico, desolate of people, the population having dwindled due to lack of women.

The cartel fighters spend essentially all of their time in four pursuits: the drug trade, raiding for women and girls, partying and playing baseball.

We meet one surviving man who is not in a cartel. Rogelio (Rogelio Sosa) has been imprisoned by a cartel to perform as the groundskeeper of the baseball field at their base. Rogelio is addicted to drugs, and he knows that his life is subject to the whim of any of the fighters at any moment, particularly the terrifying and gender-ambiguous cartel commander (Sostenes Rojas).

While Rogelio walks the tightrope of narco murderers, he is hiding a high stakes secret in plain sight. He has a 10-year-old daughter Huck (Mathilde Hernandez) who he is protecting from the fighters by pretending that she is a boy. If the cartel fighters discover his ruse, he will certainly be killed and his daughter will certainly become a sex slave. Because he can’t escape (and there is no place to escape TO), this is Rogelio’s best option, as harrowing as it is.

Rogelio Sosa and Mathilde Hernandez in BUY ME A GUN. Photo courtesy of Cinequest.

Huck is not the only child at the narco base – she has a pack of feral friends, some horribly disfigured from the environment of violence and the cartel’s cruelty.

While in the throes of his addiction, the groundskeeper is decent, resourceful and brave – devoted to his daughter in a hopeless situation. This is an extraordinary performance by Rogelio Sosa.

One childish mistake puts the dad and daughter in jeopardy. Will she escape the danger? Buy Me a Gun turns into a heart-pounding thriller.

Buy Me a Gun is written and directed by Julio Hernández Cordón, and it’s an impressive achievement, one of the most original films I’ve seen in this decade. One scene in particular, involving a trumpet and purple smoke to illustrate smoking drugs, is genius. Along with Huck, there are child characters that Hernández Cordón has named Tom and Sawyer.

The only crappy thing about Buy Me a Gun is its title, which would better fit a shallow crime movie than such a profound fable.

I screened Buy Me a Gun the 2019 Cinequest before its theatrical release in Mexico. At the 2020 Ariel awards (Mexico’s Oscars) , it garnered eight nominations including for Best Picture, Director and Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor for Sostenes Rojas. Buy Me a Gun is now is now streaming on Amazon, AppleTV, and YouTube  

BEFORE THE FIRE: when sanctuary brings its own terror

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Photo caption: BEFORE THE FIRE. Photo courtesy of Cinequest.

To honor Cinequest, now underway, here’s the Must See from the 2020 festival; ironically, it’s a pandemic thriller which premiered at a film festival that was cut short by COVID. In the thriller Before the Fire, the only escape from an apocalyptic flu pandemic is a woman’s long-estranged rural hometown – but the scary family who traumatized her childhood is there, too. Written by its female star Jenna Lyng Adams, and the first feature by its female director Charlie Buhler, this indie thriller rocks.

Ava Boone (Adams) is a Hollywood actress who has found some success “pretending to be a vampire”, as she puts it, on a television series. As a killer flu sweeps America’s cities, her photojournalist husband (Jackson Davis) seeks to save her by tricking her into refuge with his family in their sparsely populated childhood hometown.

The problem is that growing up in a family ruled by her abusive father was deeply traumatizing. And it’s only a matter of time until her family finds out that she’s back.

As star and screenwriter Adams has said, “but what if the last place you wanted to go was the only place you could go?”

Veteran Charles Hubbell is excellent as the monstrous dad. The part is written to acknowledge that domestic abuse is about power and control – and not just physical abuse. This guy emanates physical brutality, but he is also a master manipulator.

To make things worse, the dad leads a militia of Deliverance-style yahoos, whose strategy to suppress the flu is to murder outsiders.

Ava was once – and is definitely no longer – a farm girl. For necessity’s sake, she begins repairing fences and doing the other hard, dirty and unglamorous work of the family farm run by her husband’s brother (Ryan Vigilant) and his mother (M.J. Karmi). Along the way, she physically hardens up and develops some skills with firearms.

Jenna Lyng Adams in BEFORE THE FIRE. Photo courtesy of Cinequest.

Unsurprisingly (since she wrote it), the role of Ava is a showcase for Jenna Lyng Adams (The Kominsky Files). When Ava first sees her father again, she’s terrified to her core, which tells us all we need from the back story. Adams’ performance is compelling and credible as Ava has to devise and execute her own survival plan. Adams is on-screen in almost every scene and carries the picture.

“Audiences are thirsty for unconventional, layered, and imperfect women on-screen,” said Adams. “I wanted our protagonist to find her strength by facing the darkest parts of her life in the darkest hours of the world. She reinvents herself over and over again to survive.”

“We fought to make this movie, because we felt that there was a very specific expectation about the types of stories women were able to tell,” says director Charlie Buhler.  “Male directors shift between genres much more fluidly, and I think you can feel it in the types of stories that make it to the screen. But Jenna and I both love action, we both love sci-fi, so we wanted to make a female protagonist that we women could really rally behind.”

Indeed, women filmmakers shouldn’t be left to the high-falutin’ Message Pictures while the guys have all the fun with the genre movies.

BEFORE THE FIRE. Photo courtesy of Cinequest.

Before the Fire was filmed on location in South Dakota. Cinematographer Drew Bienemann (visual effects in Beasts of the Southern Wild) makes the barren wintry landscape work to illustrate the Ava’s isolation and vulnerability.

BEFORE THE FIRE. Photo courtesy of Cinequest.

I screened Before the Fire for its world premiere at Cinequest, You can stream it from Amazon, AppleTV. Vudu, YouTube and Showtime. Make sure that you have the Jenna Lng Adams film, not one of the other recent movies with the same title.

The best of Cinequest 2022

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Photo caption: Michael James Kelly and Elizabeth Hirsch-Tauber in Clinton Cornwell’s 12 MONTHS, world premiere at Cinequest. Courtesy of Cinequest.

Cinequest’s online festival CINEJOY begins on April 1 and runs through April 17. Here are my top picks:

MUST SEE

  • 12 Months: This uncommonly authentic film traces the year-long span of a romance, using vignettes that are snapshots of the relationship’s evolution. Just like a real life relationship, 12 Months has moments that are playful and moments that are searing. 12 Months is entirely improvised by its director and its stars, who are extremely keen and perceptive observers of relationship behavior, and they don’t hit a single wrong note. It’s the Must See at this year’s Cinequest. World premiere.

INTERNATIONAL CINEMA

  • The Grand Bolero: Early in COVID’s devastating assault on Northern Italy, a middle-aged organ restorer is locked down in a centuries-old church; a salty curmudgeon, she cruelly resists the assistant forced upon her – a runaway young mute woman with no place else to shelter. But the young woman’s unexpected musical gift unlocks passion in the older woman. Passion evolves into obsession, propelling the story to an operatic finale. The Grand Bolero is the most visually beautiful film that I’ve seen in some time, and the music is powerfully evocative. It’s a remarkable first feature for director, co-writer and editor Gabriele Fabbro and his cinematographer Jessica La Malfa.

DOCUMENTARY

  • Tell Me a Memory is a simple, yet engrossing, LGBTQ+ oral history. One or two at a time, individuals from Memphis (did you know they call themselves Memphians?) tell their own stories. The subjects are impressively diverse – in age, gender, race and identity. Coming Out in the Bible Belt is a common thread. This is a gentle and emotionally powerful film.

AND TWO MORE

  • 18 1/2 is the festival’s Opening Night film, a dark comedy that sends up the paranoid thriller genre. A low-level government clerical worker (an excellent Willa Fitzgerald) finds herself in possession of the infamous 18 1/2 minute gap in the Watergate Tapes. Of course, co-writers Daniel Moya and Dan Mirvish had to devise a way to get this MacGuffin in her hands; given the paranoia, deviousness and clumsiness of the Nixon White House, their solution is surprisingly plausible. Double crosses and red herrings escalate, as does the dark, dark humor. Richard Kind and Vondie Curtis-Hall sparkle in supporting roles.
  • Alpha Male, from Poland, is another dark comedy. A feckless young man has been dispatched by his girlfriend to a smoking cessation self-help group. Given the chaos of the community center, he ends up in the wrong room, among a men’s support group headed by a charismatic instructor. He hangs around anyway – and even returns – because this group has better food. The group focuses on their resentment of women, which seems silly and harmless at first, but descends into a paranoid fixation on an imagined organization of women seeking to emasculate them. Both the misogyny and their submissiveness to their bullying leader are taken to absurd levels.

This is the twelfth year that I’ve covered Cinequest, and, as usual, I’ll be covering Cinequest rigorously with features and movie recommendations. Bookmark my CINEQUEST 2022 page, with links to all my coverage (links on the individual movies will start to go live on Thursday, March 31st). Follow me on Twitter for the latest.

12 MONTHS: an authentic relationship evolves

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Photo caption: Michael James Kelly and Elizabeth Hirsch-Tauber in 12 MONTHS. Courtesy of Cinequest.

The uncommonly authentic 12 Months traces the year-long span of a romance, using vignettes that are snapshots of the relationship’s evolution. Just like a real life relationship, 12 Months has moments that are playful and moments that are searing. It’s the Must See at this year’s Cinequest.

Ellie (Elizabeth Hirsch-Tauber) and Clark (Michael James Kelly) share a first date, which leads to another, and things get serious. Both Ellie and Clark are decent, smart, sincere and vulnerable; each has quirks, but neither is a bundle of red flags. Each deserves to find a partner, and, so, are they a fit?

Directed by Clinton Cornwell in his feature debut, 12 Months is entirely improvised. Cornwell is credited for the story, Hirsch-Tauber as executive story editor and Kelly as contributing writer. 12 Months is an especially promising calling card for all three.

12 Months soars in recognizing that relationships are rarely symmetrical. The two people involved generally experience different levels of attraction, security, commitment, confidence, comfort and maturity – and at different times.

And 12 Months understands that what a relationship can survive isn’t always predictable, whether it be depression, a sexual proclivity or an out-of-town work assignment.

Clearly, Cornwell, Hirsch-Tauber and Kelly are extremely keen and perceptive observers of relationship behavior (whether from their own or those of others). They don’t hit a single wrong note in12 Months.

Clark’s and Ellie’s best pals are played, respectively, by Christopher Mychael Watson and Lindsey Rose Naves, and they are hilarious.

Movies like 12 Months are why we have film festivals. Cinequest hosts the world premiere of 12 Months, and you can stream it at Cinejoy. View the trailer.

Michael James Kelly and Elizabeth Hirsch-Tauber in 12 MONTHS. Courtesy of Cinequest.

THE GRAND BOLERO: passion unlocked

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Photo caption: Lidia Vitale and Ludovica Mancini in Gabriele Fabbro’s THE GRAND BOLERO at Cinequest. Courtesy of Cinequest.

The Grand Bolero is set in winter 2020, early in COVID’s devastating assault on Northern Italy. Roxanne (Lidia Vitale), a middle-aged organ restorer, is locked down in a centuries-old church, along with her client Paolo (Marcelli Mariani). Lucia (Ludovica Mancini), a runaway young mute woman with no place else to shelter, arrives at the church. In an act of kindness, Paolo brings her into the church as an assistant to Roxanne. A salty curmudgeon, Roxanne cruelly resists, even when Palolo chides her, “you know what it’s like to be scared and alone.”

Indeed, Roxanne is a solitary person in a solitary profession, moving from church to church to repair the ancient organs.

But Lucia’s unexpected musical gift unlocks appreciation and then passion in the older woman. Passion evolves into obsession, propelling the story to an operatic finale.

Lidia Vitale and Ludovica Mancini in Gabriele Fabbro’s THE GRAND BOLERO at Cinequest. Courtesy of Cinequest.

The Grand Bolero is the most visually beautiful film that I’ve seen in some time. The interior scenes evoke the warmth of candlelight. The characters find relief from the lockdown in stroll through natural beauty characters find comfort in exteriors in the bright crispness of the northern Italian winter. It’s a remarkable first feature for director, co-writer and editor Gabriele Fabbro and his cinematographer Jessica La Malfa.

The all-absorbing power of organ music naturally complements a story of passion. Roxanne becomes transfixed as she watches Lucia’s bare shoulders heaving at the organ. The story climaxes as the dialogue is drowned out by an organ performance of Ravel’s Bolero.

The Grand Bolero is in competition for Best Narrative Feature at Cinequest and may be streamed through April 17 at Cinejoy.