Yana Osman (right) in her TWIN FENCES. Courtesy of Slamdance.
In her quirky, and finally profound, documentary Twin Fences, writer-director Yana Osman starts us off with what seems like a a droll, absurdist film about a ridiculously obscure subject, a prefab concrete fence design replicated thru the USSR. Osman stands, hands down at her side, facing the camera, spouting random facts. It may be off-putting at first, but the approach grows to be intoxicating. When she finds talking heads who are actually experts on the fences, we wonder if we’re watching a parody of a talking head expert documentary. We even hear about a Soviet who returned from Chicago in the 1920s, inspired to improve public health with a proprietary sausage.
Osman’s story takes us through Russia, Afghanistan and Ukraine, until there’s a pivotal tragedy in her family. The ending, with her grandfather, is sweet and heartbreaking. Only then do we realize that we’ve just watched a clear-eyed comment on contemporary Russia.
TWIN FENCES. Courtesy of Slamdance.
I’ve never seen a film that wanders across such disparate topics over 99 minutes, seemingly randomly, but which turns out to get somewhere unexpected and worth arriving at. This is Osman’s first feature; Twin Fences is very well-edited, and unsettling tones on the soundtrack help tell the story. Osman is an idiosyncratic, and, I think, pretty brilliant filmmaker.
Audiences who hang withTwin Fences will be rewarded. I screened Twin Fences for its North American premiere at Slamdance.
Slamdance is all about discovering new filmmakers and unveiling their work. The 146 films in this year’s program hail from 20 countries and were selected from 9,381 submissions. Slamdance alumni include: Christopher Nolan (Oppenheimer, Memento,Dunkirk), Bong Joon-ho (Parasite), Benh Zeitlin (Beasts of the Southern Wild), Jeremy Saulnier (Blue Ruin, Green Room), Lynn Shelton (Outside In,Sword of Truth), Sean Baker (The Florida Project, Tangerine), Rian Johnson (Knives Out, Brick), Benny & Josh Safdie (Uncut Gems) and the Russo Brothers (Avengers: Infinity War).
Here are my recommendations from Slamdance:
Universe25: This thoughtful, ever-surprising and mysterious film embeds a fable of self-discovery in a dystopian sci-fi framework. Mott the Angel (Giacomo Gex) is sent to Earth, essentially on a cleanup mission, by a Creator who is ready to pull the plug on our world. In a singular and impressive feature debut, writer-director Richard Melkonian has imagined a look at humanity from an space alien’s point of view. As he careens from Britain to Romania, Mott questions just what/who he aspires to be. Hilariously, the story is revealed when the scroll that Mott writes for the Creator ends up in the lost mail bin, where it is read by a bitter postal clerk. World premiere.
Banr: The star here is writer/director/editor Erica Xia-Hou’s innovative storytelling – in her first feature film. An elderly husband, is struggling to hold on to his wife as she sinks into Alzheimer’s, with the support of their adult daughter (Xia-Hou herself). That main story is told in a cinéma vérité documentary style, but that’s just what the husband and daughter see in their lucidity. Those segments are interwoven with fragments of the wife’s memory and her delusions and dreams. In depicting the most ordinary daily activities, Xia-Hou keeps us continually off-guard by shifting the points of view between the clear-eyed and the muddled. Banr is an immersive film, filled with humanity. World premiere.
FOUL EVIL DEEDS: This deadpan anthology depicts a range of aberrant human behavior, most of it darkly funny. The deeds themselves arise from a variety of root causes: inner rage, social clumsiness, youthful stupidity, an uncommon sexual need, entitlement – and one from deep-seated evil. It’s a wry, clever and very cynical movie that veers to the misanthropic. Richard Hunter’s debut feature is consciously an art film; Hunter says he is influenced by the work of Ulrich Seidl, Michael Haneke and Roy Andersson, and it shows. It’s a slow burn, and the audience wonders, why is that guy checking out the remote wooded wetland? Alexander Perkins is excellent as a man grinding his teeth through workaday drudgery as a consequence of anger management issues that he can’t shake, and there’s an unexpectedly riveting performance by Oengus MacNamara in a minor role. The segment about a neighbor’s cat could have been written by Larry David about George Costanza. I think that FOUL EVIL DEEDS is likely to secure US arthouse distribution. North American premiere.
Twin Fences: Director Yana Osman starts us out with a droll, absurdist doc on a ridiculously obscure subject, then hits us with a pivotal family tragedy, and finishes, with her own grandfather, in a sweet and heartbreaking ending. Only then, do we realize that we’ve just watched a clear-eyed comment on contemporary Russia. Audiences who hang with this first feature by Osman will be rewarded. Osman is an idiosyncratic, and I think, pretty brilliant filmmaker. North American premiere.
Memories of Love Returned: On a 2002 trip to his native Uganda, actor Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine (Treme, The Chi, The Lincoln Lawyer) happened upon a rural studio portrait photographer named Kibaate. Over a span of decades, Kibaate had documented everyday people over decades in thousands of portrait, many of them stunningly evocative. Mwine helped Kibaate preserve his body of work, and after Kibaate’s death 20 years later, organized a public showcase of Kibaate’s collection. The revelation of the unknown Kibaate as an artistic genius, is a compelling enough story, but the exhibition prompts a complicated and sometimes awkward exploration of Kibaate’s siring a prodigious number of children with a bevy of surviving mothers. The filmmaker’s own health and family story takes Memories of Love Returned seamlessly into another direction, topped off by Kibaate’s documentation of Ugandan LGBTQ culture. The second documentary feature directed by Mwine, Memories of Love Returned has been piling up awards from film festivals.
FISHMONGER (short): I rarely write about short films, but this is such a very funny gross-out horror comedy, that I can’t resist. The story is about a pudgy Irish fishmonger who must mate with a sea monster to save the soul of his dying mother. Lots of bursting lesions and vomited objects. Beautifully photographed in Gothic horror black and white.
Remember, you can watch ALL of them at home through March 7 for only fifty bucks.
Baoqing Li and Sui Li in BANR. Courtesy of ShangJia Picture Film Culture.
Photo caption: Trey Holland and Romina D’Ugo in Woody Bess’ PORTAL TO HELL. Courtesy of Portal to Hell LLC
It’s time for the 31st Slamdance Film Festival, which is all about discovering new filmmakers and unveiling their work. After 30 years in Utah, this is the first Slamdance in Los Angeles. It’s a hybrid festival with live events (February 20-26) and online via the Slamdance Channel (February 24-March 7). Three LA venues will host the screenings – The Egyptian Theatre Hollywood, Directors Guild of America and Quixote Studios.
All Slamdance feature films selected in the competition categories have traditionally bee directorial debuts without U.S. distribution, with budgets of less than $1 million. The 146 films in this year’s program hail from 20 countries and were selected from 9,381 submissions.
Slamdance was founded in 1995 by filmmakers reacting to the gatekeeper role and growing marketplace focus of a nearby Utah film festival with a similar name. Whenever I cover a film festival, I’m on the lookout for first films and world premieres – and here’s a festival essentially entirely made up of first films and world premieres.
Slamdance alumni include: Christopher Nolan (Oppenheimer, Memento,Dunkirk), Bong Joon-ho (Parasite), Benh Zeitlin (Beasts of the Southern Wild), Jeremy Saulnier (Blue Ruin, Green Room), Lynn Shelton (Outside In,Sword of Truth), Sean Baker (The Florida Project, Tangerine), Rian Johnson (Knives Out, Brick), Benny & Josh Safdie (Uncut Gems) and the Russo Brothers (Avengers: Infinity War).
Photo caption: Giacomo Gex in Richard Melkonian’s UNIVERSE 25. Courtesy of Slamdance.
MUST SEE
Here are four narrative features, two documentaries and a short from the 2025 Slamdance program that you shouldn’t miss. Each features at least one original and fresh element:
Universe25: This thoughtful, ever-surprising and mysterious film embeds a fable of self-discovery in a dystopian sci-fi framework. Mott the Angel (Giacomo Gex) is sent to Earth, essentially on a cleanup mission, by a Creator who is ready to pull the plug on our world. In a singular and impressive feature debut, writer-director Richard Melkonian has imagined a look at humanity from an space alien’s point of view. As he careens from Britain to Romania, Mott questions just what/who he aspires to be. Hilariously, the story is revealed when the scroll that Mott writes for the Creator ends up in the lost mail bin, where it is read by a bitter postal clerk. World premiere.
Portal to Hell: In this witty, dark comedy, a hangdog bill collector named Dunn (get it?) discovers a portal to hell, replete with hellfire and brimstone, in his local laundromat, and he strikes a bargain with its proprietor. Dunn is too nice for his wretched job, but just what is he capable of? And how about the insipid pop band who sings your least favorite earworm – who wouldn’t want to consign THEM to hell? Portal to Hell considers the question, what is a good person? but never too seriously. This is an imaginative, comic triumph for writer/director/cinematographer Woody Bess. Trey Holland and Romina D’Ugo are excellent as the leads, and Portal to Hell benefits from very rich supporting performances from lauded actors Keith David and Richard Kind. Portal to Hell could be the most sure-fire crowd-pleaser at this year’s Slamdance. World premiere.
Banr: The star here is writer/director/editor Erica Xia-Hou’s innovative storytelling – in her first feature film. An elderly husband, is struggling to hold on to his wife as she sinks into Alzheimer’s, with the support of their adult daughter (Xia-Hou herself). That main story is told in a cinéma vérité documentary style, but that’s just what the husband and daughter see in their lucidity. Those segments are interwoven with fragments of the wife’s memory and her delusions and dreams. In depicting the most ordinary daily activities, Xia-Hou keeps us continually off-guard by shifting the points of view between the clear-eyed and the muddled. Banr is an immersive film, filled with humanity. World premiere.
FOUL EVIL DEEDS: This deadpan anthology depicts a range of aberrant human behavior, most of it darkly funny. The deeds themselves arise from a variety of root causes: inner rage, social clumsiness, youthful stupidity, an uncommon sexual need, entitlement – and one from deep-seated evil. It’s a wry, clever and very cynical movie that veers to the misanthropic. Richard Hunter’s debut feature is consciously an art film; Hunter says he is influenced by the work of Ulrich Seidl, Michael Haneke and Roy Andersson, and it shows. It’s a slow burn, and the audience wonders, why is that guy checking out the remote wooded wetland? Alexander Perkins is excellent as a man grinding his teeth through workaday drudgery as a consequence of anger management issues that he can’t shake, and there’s an unexpectedly riveting performance by Oengus MacNamara in a minor role. The segment about a neighbor’s cat could have been written by Larry David about George Costanza. I think that FOUL EVIL DEEDS is likely to secure US arthouse distribution. North American premiere.
Twin Fences: Director Yana Osman starts us out with a droll, absurdist doc on a ridiculously obscure subject, then hits us with a pivotal family tragedy, and finishes, with her own grandfather, in a sweet and heartbreaking ending. Only then, do we realize that we’ve just watched a clear-eyed comment on contemporary Russia. Audiences who hang with this first feature by Osman will be rewarded. Osman is an idiosyncratic, and I think, pretty brilliant filmmaker. North American premiere.
Memories of Love Returned: On a 2002 trip to his native Uganda, actor Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine (Treme, The Chi, The Lincoln Lawyer) happened upon a rural studio portrait photographer named Kibaate. Over a span of decades, Kibaate had documented everyday people over decades in thousands of portrait, many of them stunningly evocative. Mwine helped Kibaate preserve his body of work, and after Kibaate’s death 20 years later, organized a public showcase of Kibaate’s collection. The revelation of the unknown Kibaate as an artistic genius, is a compelling enough story, but the exhibition prompts a complicated and sometimes awkward exploration of Kibaate’s siring a prodigious number of children with a bevy of surviving mothers. The filmmaker’s own health and family story takes Memories of Love Returned seamlessly into another direction, topped off by Kibaate’s documentation of Ugandan LGBTQ culture. The second documentary feature directed by Mwine, Memories of Love Returned has been piling up awards from film festivals.
FISHMONGER (short): I rarely write about short films, but this is such a very funny gross-out horror comedy, that I can’t resist. The story is about a pudgy Irish fishmonger who must mate with a sea monster to save the soul of his dying mother. Lots of bursting lesions and vomited objects. Beautifully photographed in Gothic horror black and white.
I’ll start rolling out full reviews of some Slamdance films on February 24th. Remember, even if you don’t get to the fest in LA, you can sample these films on the Slamdance Channel from February 24 thru March 7.
Filmmaker Yana Osman (right) in TWIN FENCES. Courtesy of Slamdance.
