Showing posts with label
North Bend Film Festival 2021.
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Showing posts with label
North Bend Film Festival 2021.
Show all posts
Orphan Cha Yeon-hee (Ahn Ji-hye) has spent her entire life wanting to be a heroine. If you’re not a heroine, you’re useless and of no value to anyone. So she believes. In her late-20s, living an aimless life, she lands a role as a stunt double in an action movie. Only when she arrives on set, she’s transported to a parallel world where she must become an actual heroine. The only question is: is she ready to face actual danger and do what she must to become a real heroine? So goes Slate, the latest from Gang director Jo Ba-reun.
A retired hairdresser walking across a small town doesn’t sound like the most exciting basis for a movie. But when that hairdresser is Udo Kier, and he’s on his way to style a former client’s hair for her funeral, as is the case in writer/director Todd Stephens’ Swan Song, it becomes an odyssey of near-mythic proportions, both epic and intimate in scope. Topped off by one of the best performances of the year, this is funny and sweet, sad and joyous, simultaneously soul-crushing and life-affirming, and deeply, deeply human.
Though it’s only been around a few years, the North Bend Film Festival has quickly become one of my favorite fests. Part of that affection is obviously geographic proximity. (It’s an easy drive from Seattle, so there’s minimal travel.) But it also takes place in an odd little hamlet nestled in the mountains. (North Bend is where Twin Peaks was filmed and you understand why when you experience the off-kilter oddness in person.)
