Wednesday, September 19, 2012
Film '25 New Faces' Kicks Off Tonight at Belcourt with An Oversimplification of Her Beauty
Posted by Jim Ridley on Wed, Sep 19, 2012 at 5:03 AM
On CL and in the Scene's Fall Guide last week, we noted that Filmmaker magazine has made Nashville one of only four U.S. stops on its "25 New Faces of Independent Film" tour. That tour lands in Nashville tonight at The Belcourt, and the first feature is a winner: Terence Nance's inventive not-quite-a-love-story An Oversimplification of Her Beauty. From last week's Scene:
Nance is a member of Cinema Stereo, the New York-based filmmakers' collective that describes itself as "a community of filmmakers focused on restoring the humanity and diversity of Black narratives, while making the dopest shit of all time." He's given it a run for his money. The film (which screened both at Sundance and in New Directors/New Films) employs split screens, stop-motion and hand-drawn animation, dolls and a breezy quasi-Nouvelle Vague style to chart the director's fling-that-never-was with actress Namik Winter (who plays herself). Picture a hybrid of Annie Hall, a Prince vehicle and William Greaves' landmark filmmaking-as-social-experiment doc Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One, and you've got this near-romance of great charm, playful spirit and restless self-questioning, featuring two leads whose chemistry is powerful enough to motor the movie.
Preceding the screening tonight at 7 p.m. is "Belly," Julia Pott's animated coming-of-age film.
