Screening to be followed by a prerecorded Q&A with Rob Tregenza and Jonathan Rosenbaum
A slow film about a fast subject.
Rob Tregenza has worked at the leading edge of American independent cinema since his 1988 debut Talking to Strangers, a film built entirely from extended single-take sequences shot in nine locations across the city of Baltimore. His subsequent films—including Inside/Out (1997), Gavagai (2016), and The Fishing Place (2024)—constitute a body of work defined less by narrative than by the physical weight of recorded reality. Largely self-financed and operating outside the festival-circuit economy, he remains one of the few American filmmakers whose practice has more in common with Straub-Huillet or Chantal Akerman than with anything produced in the American independent mainstream.
Tregenza’s sixth feature returns to the American South—shot on location in Lexington and Richmond, Virginia—after his Norwegian excursions in Gavagai and The Fishing Place. Says Tregenza: “For Sterling (Madison Pankey), a sort of present day Alice, the graveyard Lotus she redeems becomes a totem, a saturated phenomenon permitting her to move freely in time on a phantom road. It is a sort of Ford but never a DeLorean. A Southern woman with a fair deal of historical baggage and deep secrets, Sterling journeys back to her rural home, the Lotus takes her through the shadow of the valley into the adjoining worlds of the living and the dead. Desiring to become an F1 driver, Sterling must go fast/hard, against/through all tunnels imagined or concrete.” (MoMA)
TRT: 96 min
“Tregenza is adept at deploying the conventions of mainstream fiction... but he’s more interested in dismantling norms than in just recycling them." —Manohla Dargis, The New York Times
"Tregenza doesn’t flatter the audience’s cleverness or suffocate them with his own. His shards of narrative spark imagination and inquisitiveness instead of satisfaction, despite the intense beauty of his images." —Patrick Dahl, Screen Slate
“[Rob] Tregenza is a sort of counter-Ophüls: a rhapsodist of the unworldly.... Tregenza is after lyricism without cynicism, bitterness and sweetness without bittersweetness, emotions unmixed and irony-free.” —Richard Brody, The New Yorker
"Since 1988’s Talking to Strangers, [Tregenza's] experimented with the crane shot, a choice that always brings a touch of the miraculous to the mundane, as if, in those moments where the camera hovers over the characters in his worlds, we’re looking through the eyes of angels." —Zach Lewis, Slant Magazine
"With a curious combination of sophistication and naivete, virtuoso camera work and amateurishness in other areas, Tregenza appears out of nowhere and confounds the system even more than Godard does by creating a few new rules of movie watching that can’t be comfortably filed away under categories governing other films — even other films by one producer/writer/director/cinematographer." —Jonathan Rosenbaum, The Chicago Reader
(Available to download after screening date)