Softshell “Another year, another New/Next” seems to turn into a certainty in Baltimore. After final 12 months’s inaugural pageant, it wasn’t identified if New/Next Film Festival was a one-off occasion or if the Maryland Film Festival would return from hiatus. In 2024, each occurred a pair months and a block aside in Station North, and each introduced on their closing nights that they are going to be again for 2025. For the foreseeable future, Baltimore has two tentpole, unjuried unbiased movie festivals; what isn’t sure is how they will interaction with one another as institutions, reasonably than occasions with query marks hooked up. MdFF bookended itself with speeches from Maryland’s governor and Baltimore’s mayor, whereas New/Next stored it much less formal, opening and shutting with remarks from the fest’s important sponsor (native NPR affiliate WYPR) in addition to the fest’s co-founder and lead programmer, Eric Allen Hatch. MdFF, as I reported again in May, got here again with institutional drive; New/Next is right here by sheer drive of will.
This 12 months’s lineup was massively expanded: the inaugural pageant hosted 75 movies versus this 12 months’s 126 (23 options and 52 shorts vs. 37 options and 89 shorts), a 68% improve taking on all 5 screens of The Charles Theater (from 4 final 12 months) for 3 full days plus a gap evening. Over 200 folks had been there representing movies, and Hatch famous that whereas the fest had the finances to pay for and accommodate for one particular person for every characteristic, that was not the case for brief filmmakers—which means New/Next was seen as price it to the overwhelming majority of business attendees to journey to Baltimore on their very own dime. It verged on an excessive amount of. Indeed, it might be bodily inconceivable to see every part (neither is it wholly essential), and regardless of having spent 12 hours a day at The Charles I preserve operating into mates round city who went to a number of screenings and by no means as soon as crossed paths within the theater’s quick hallway. Having too many good choices might be the very best drawback a movie pageant might have, particularly one solely in its sophomore version, and it’ll be as much as subsequent ones to see how way more the fest can stretch its legs out, what kind of turnout it might probably keep or bolster by way of taking part in movies extra occasions or what number of calendar days it might probably sustainably develop to.
There’s two rapid features to a pageant like New/Next: bringing folks and movies into town, and what town can challenge again out. To that first, New/Next introduced in low-budget pageant favorites like Joel Potrykus’ Tribeca premiere Vulcanizadora (2024), Carson Lund’s debut Eephus (2024) (taking part in concurrently at NYFF) and Lisandro Alonso’s Eureka (2023), nonetheless operating the fest circuit after premiered at Cannes over a 12 months in the past. New/Next might be the one alternative for any of those movies to play The Charles, presently the one first-run theater on the town specializing in unbiased and worldwide cinema.
Chloé Robichaud’s third characteristic, Days of Happiness (2023), was the standout of movies within the limbo between pageant screenings and eventual streaming releases. Robichaud was one of many sharpest new voices in Québécois cinema within the 2010s, and regardless of a restricted launch within the provinces Days hasn’t made waves it ought to have overseas. This might be partially due to how intently the logline mirrors one other movie a couple of lesbian conductor operating by way of interpersonal {and professional} battle whereas getting ready for a climatic sequence centered on Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. But any textual parallels with TÁR (2022) finish there—and the place that movie performs off the “Adagietto” as a winking reference to Death in Venice (1971), Days of Happiness seeks to discover how the act of conducting it really works as a type of inventive, emotional expression, taking music—and artwork—severely as processes by which we perceive ourselves. Days of Happiness is held firmly collectively by Sophie Desmarais’ central efficiency, reuniting with Robichaud over a decade after their work collectively on Sarah Prefers to Run (2013), for a movie largely made up of Desmarais reacting to the world round her.
As for projecting out, Corey Hughes’ first characteristic Your Final Meditation (2024) was New/Next’s sole characteristic produced in Baltimore. Starring Midnight Sun frontwoman Hanna Olivegren as Jodiiie, a girl operating by way of a VR guided meditation which slowly devolves in direction of a harmful conclusion, Your Final Meditation’s digitally generated imagery makes use of 360 cameras to create a hybrid reality-meets-video-games aesthetic as disorienting and alienating as it’s purely mesmerizing. But whereas Jodiiie slips deeper and deeper into the inner world of VR, her bodily actuality is in danger: the constructing she lives in has been bought. Filmed within the warehouse area Floristree within the H&H Arts Building in downtown Baltimore within the last weeks earlier than new house owners took over from displaced tenants, Your Final Meditation can be a doc of a rapidly disappearing DIY Baltimore. Much of Jodiiie’s room was “assembled from furniture, artwork, objects and plants that had lived in that space over twenty years and been passed along between artists and musicians that lived there,” in line with Hughes.
The movie additionally stands as a showcase for the manufacturing expertise established over town’s scene within the final decade: Hughes was a daily cinematographer for each Theo Anthony and Marnie Ellen Hertzler, and Your Final Meditation was produced by Jonna Mckone (All Light Everywhere [2021], Squeegee [2024]) and Daniel April (The Sweet East [2023]), with cinematography from Tyler Davis (Strawberry Mansion [2021]), manufacturing design by Becca Morin (Unedited Footage of a Bear [2014], Rat Film [2016]) and VFX by Meredith Moore (Margie Soudek’s Salt and Pepper Shakers [2023]). What additionally hyperlinks these native artists collectively is the manufacturing firm MEMORY which, whereas L.A.-based, made a second residence in Baltimore at MdFF with the likes of Anthony’s Rat Film and Hertzler’s Crestone (2020). MEMORY was at New/Next this 12 months presenting Physician, Heal Thyself, Asher Penn’s debut documentary about controversial Canadian physician and author Gabor Maté. MEMORY additionally selected New/Next because the venue for one in every of its tenth anniversary celebrations (DJ’d by Dan Deacon, after all), additional demonstrating New/Next’s lineage with the filmmaking neighborhood from MdFF’s heyday.
By unbiased movie requirements, these are established faces; who’s subsequent? The first place to look is at all times the shorts packages, the place two caught me above all of the others. In GANGBANG (2023) by Christian Meola, a gaggle of shirtless, conventionally enticing younger males of all completely different classifications stand round a mattress, smiling into the digicam, in a shot that holds and holds far past consolation till everybody begins laughing. The pictures start to fade over one another into smiling close-ups or the lads organized in numerous collections of poses across the mattress. It is a homosexual porno with out porn, solely the anticipation of the show of bodily pleasure that may by no means come. In the Late Night program, Living Reality (2024) by Philip Thompson begins as a faux 2000s sitcom, mixing a How I Met Your Mother cadence with the haunting texture of dying DV cameras. People quip for viewers reactions, however when Thompson’s character Theo chimes in, his disaffection is met with the lifeless air of the area between snigger tracks. Theo leaves the pristine three partitions of the preliminary set and goes again to his cramped residence, embellished with a mattress on the ground and an outdated TV. The pictures Theo sees from his finish of TV actuality are an inverse sitcom serving the identical escapist perform, down and soiled verite of younger folks residing in “real” residences and having “real” conversations. The grain of the pictures falls aside because the digicam zooms out and in in low lighting, turning banal interactions right into a whirlwind fantasia of odd youth.
The greatest movie of the fest appeared out of the blue through a FilmFreeway submission. “It’s a rare treat for a film programmer to come across a discovery as strong as Softshell (2024) in their call for entries,” Hatch writes in his programming notes. “But I wasn’t dreaming, and Softshell is the real deal.” I agree: Jinho Myung’s first characteristic is harking back to the lowkey formal confidence and delicate, humanistic texture of Andrew Bujalski in Funny Ha Ha (2002) paired with on-the-New-York-streets tonality of Josh Safdie’s The Pleasure of Being Robbed (2008) (with a few narrative nods to the latter, besides). That is to not say Myung is imitative. Instead, his fashion feels intuitive, operating off good hunches about feelings of estrangement operating between the strains of dialog, conveying emotions in ways in which phrases can’t, however typically movie can if performed proper. Following a Thai-American brother-sister pair by way of their early maturity within the wake of their mom’s demise, Softshell usually abandons typical protection or temporality for multi-screen narrative condensation; overlays to current texting on display screen are changed with diptych pictures the place we see the messaging characters within the totality of their our bodies in an setting, exactly the alternative of how they exist in a messaging app. Jinho Myung discovered New/Next, and New/Next discovered him; hopefully many extra are about to search out out about each.
