Tag: Chattanooga film festival
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Chattanooga Film Festival: Pater Noster and the Mission of Light: Vinyl Gospel in a Wasteland of Flesh: A Hymn to Broken Generations
If vinyl could bleed, and discourse could blister, this film would be the wound. In Pater Noster and the Mission of Light, director Christopher Bickel doesn’t soothe—he scalds. He conjures a world where sociological theory is spliced with mutant births, and where peace-sign prophets and punk-rock oracles clash beneath the flicker of analog ghosts. We…
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Chattanooga Film Festival: Old Wounds: **The Body Remembers What the Heart Cannot Say**
In the tremor before a word is spoken, Old Wounds begins—shaky, intimate, already too close. The screen pulses with breath, not score. The light is soft with intent, like the hush before a wound reopens. Director Steven Hugh Nelson does not ask us to suspend disbelief—he quietly informs us we’re already inside the story, that…
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Chattanooga Film Festival: Good Night: Turns Chaos into Catharisis
When dusk swells over Buenos Aires and the pavement begins to sweat neon, Good Night unfurls like a whispered dare. Matías Szulanski’s urban nocturne doesn’t just walk you through the city—it hurtles you headlong into its waiting mouth. Here, the moon bears witness to impulsive crimes and fractured trust, and every alley glimmers with potential…
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Chattanooga Film Festival: Alan at Night: Scales in the Spotlight: The Nocturnal Comedy of Terror Rift Sideways**
In the hush of handheld horror, where moonlight flickers through cheap blinds and digital grain crackles with dread, Alan at Night slinks into view—a mockumentary masquerading as midnight confession. Jesse Swenson paints his tale not in blood, but in deli meat, spilled milk, and the soft scuttle of reptilian feet. Humor is the bait; horror,…
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Chattanooga Film Festival: Itch: **The Burn Beneath the Skin**
In a corner-store cocoon carved from grief, Itch! writhes into life—a survival psalm in shades of grief and fluorescent doom. Bari Kang’s debut horror feature unfurls like skin under fingernails: tender, raw, and impossible to ignore. Jay—widower, drunk, father—staggers beneath the weight of sorrow’s shadow. His daughter Olivia, a light too bright for his hollowed…
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Chattanooga Film Festival: Solvent: **The Skin Beneath the Screen**
Solvent does not begin. It ruptures. Like a fever breaking under pale light, like memory surfacing in static. From its first frame, the film unspools not in story but in sensation—choppy, quick-cut reveries that lacerate the eye and unsettle the breath. You do not watch Solvent so much as stagger through it, questioning what lingers…
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Chattanooga Film Festival: The Only Ones :**When the World Forgot, They Remembered**
In The Only Ones, director Jordan Miller distills horror into something intimate and aching—a kind of psychological erosion whispered through branches and gasoline haze. The terror here is not cosmic or conjured; it grows like mold in closed rooms, fed by silence, by second glances, by what was almost said. From the first frame, we…
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Chattanooga Film Festival: Dark My Night: **No Flame Without Ash**
Neal Dhand’s Dark My Night doesn’t begin—it circles. It pulses forward only to collapse inward, again and again. A severed foot is discovered on a beach, but it’s not the first time Mitchell Morse, played with fraying precision by Albert Jones, has seen it. Or maybe it is. The investigation consumes him not in a…
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Chattanooga Film Festival: They Were Witches: **The Wind Spoke Their Names**
They didn’t just find her—she found them. In They Were Witches, director Alejandro G. Alegre trades in pastoral mysticism for a blood-soaked countdown cloaked in midnight folklore. What begins as a quirky detour to a rural motel becomes a staging ground for ritual slaughter, as a group of unsuspecting 20-somethings are marked for death by…
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Chattanooga Film Festival: Abigail Before Beatrice: All Roads Turn Back
Cassie Keet’s *Abigail Before Beatrice* hums beneath the skin like a memory that never quite settled. It opens not with a bang, but with a breath held too long—a dusty room, a girl staring at a letter she’s unsure she has the right to open. Abigail (Riley Dandy) doesn’t speak in declarations. She watches. She…
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Chattanooga FF: A Guide to Becoming an Elm Tree: Respecting the Grief of Folklore…..
MOVIE INFO: Padraig (James Healy-Meaney), is a lonely and grief-stricken man who seeks the help of a mysterious carpenter names John (Gerry Wade), to help him build a coffin for his already dead and buried wife. REVIEW: I don’t mind slow films that take their time to tell their story fully visually, especially ones like…
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Chattanooga FF: CANVAS: Sibling Rivalry as Revenge Art
MOVIE NFO EVE, a reclusive, wealthy and disgraced former child-prodigy artist, longs to repair the broken relationship with her sister, MARISSA, a successful yet currently insolvent painter. Largely estranged since their father’s suicide decades ago, Eve efforts to draw Marissa back in by announcing her plan to donate three highly valuable paintings to a meager…
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Chattanooga FF: The Wheel of Heaven: Getting the Circle Game
MOVIE NFO A woman caught up in predatory relationships is thrown into a multi-layered world of choices after she discovers a mystical book in a thrift store. REVIEW: The Kentucky Fried Movie, a skit movie made in 1977, was a guilty pleasure of mine when I was a bored and lonely college student. It was…
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Chattanooga FF: Sweet Relief: Getting Through It Is the Relief
MOVIE NFO A woman’s dangerous inclinations, a sadistic child killer, and a panic surrounding an online murder challenge reveal the insidious violence of a small New England town. REVIEW: Sweet Relief has a good beginning and ending but a miserable middle. It’s a horror film about the disaffection of the online generation. Yet, most of…
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Chattanooga FF: Off Ramp: Getting to True Juggalo
MOVIE INFO: A couple of lovable, degenerate Juggalos must sojourn through America’s hellish underbelly to The Gathering of the Juggalos, the one place on earth they feel accepted REVIEW: What makes Off Ramp so enjoyable to watch is its twisted take on Deliverance, the backwood revenge story that features every racist hillbilly assumption and stereotype. …
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Someone Dies!: Forgets How Weird this Can Be
MOVIE INFO: REVIEW: Someone Dies! blends dark comedy with the crime and sci-fi genre. It’s a cheap one set flick that takes place inside an apartment. Detective Jim Jenkins (Joseph Graham) has a problem: he has received a note informing him that his daughter has been kidnapped. In order to get her back, he must…
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Chattanooga FF: Quantum Suicide: The Infinite Possibilities of Going Crazy and Dying
MOVIE NFO A lone physicist builds a particle accelerator in his garage and embarks on a quest to understand the nature of reality. REVIEW: Quantum Suicide involves the possibilities of death by a gun pointed at your head gong off if rigged to a computer system, a particle accelerator and if life or death is…
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Chattanooga FF: Love and Work: An Anti Slacker Comedy
MOVIE INFO: Diane and Fox love to work. Unfortunately, they live in a polarized world where having a job is illegal. REVIEW: Love and Work is an anti-slacker comedy about people who want to and love to work in a society that bans it. It’s a one note film that is spot on about its…
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Chattanooga FF: The Lonely Man with a Ghost Machine: The Imperfect Grief that Haunts Us
MOVIE INFO: The last man on Earth after a global catastrophe finds himself questioning his purpose and sanity as both his dead wife and a mysterious stranger confront him with his past, his present, and whatever future might remain in the wastes of a dead world. REVIEW: The director, Graham Skipper’s The Lonely Man with…
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Chattanooga FF: Cannibal Mukbang: Eating Human Life and Relationships
MOVIE INFO: Shy and looking for love, a man becomes smitten with an outgoing and mysterious woman, who, much to his surprise, reciprocates the attraction. As his feelings for her intensify, so does his unexpected submersion into the woman’s biggest fixation: the wild world of mukbanging. And with it, lots of bloodshed. REVIEW: The poster…
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Chattanooga FF: Daughter of the Sun: Getting to Malick
MOVIE INFO: A 12-year-old girl lives life on the run alongside her father who has Tourette Syndrome. Desperately seeking a normal family life, she befriends a group of outcasts who want to harness a volatile supernatural power her father is hiding. REVIEW: Daughter of the Sun , a fantasy drama about a daughter and her…
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Chattanooga FF:: The Buildout : A Story of Grief from a Young Director Trying to Find Himself
MOVIE INFO: friendship is tested as two women experience something strange in the desert. REVIEW: The Buildout, the first feature film debut of director and writer Zeshaan Yonnus is neither a horror film nor drama with tinges of sci-fi, but a somewhat shakey combination of the two. It tries to bridge the gap between found…
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Blow Up My Life: Another Generic Drug
Storyline via Chattanooga Film Festival: Jason (JASON SELVIG), a disillusioned pharmaceutical employee, is fired after a drug-fueled social media post goes viral, but when he accidentally discovers a deadly opioid conspiracy hidden by his former boss (DAVRAM STIEFLER) he sets out to redeem himself. In this noir comedy-thriller set in the age of tech, Jason…
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Local Legends: Celebrating the Non-Legendary
Storyline via IMDB: The adventures of Matt Farley as he spends a few weeks preparing for a big comedy show in Manchester, NH. Review: Local Legends stars comedian/musician Matt Farley in a mockumentary about his everyday life. It’s a pretty shaggy dog story with bits of Woody Allen’s black and white phase sprinkled in. The…
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TRAP: Getting too Close and Yet too Far to See the Real Ashbury Park
Storyline via IMDB: Facing life in prison, a hood dreams of the violent streets that forged his identity, but cursed his soul. Review: TRAP, the debut film from Anthony Edward Curry, stands for The Real Ashbury Park, draws on the lives of kids Curry grew up with, to create an impressionistic liquid narrative that becomes…
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The Weird Kidz: Just So Off-Putting
Summary via Chattanooga Film Festival: THE WEIRD KIDZ is a horror-inflected creature feature and an ode to ’80s coming-of-age films and favorite late night cinema tales. When three pre-teen boys and an older brother and his girlfriend take off for a weekend campout, none of them could imagine the horrors (and laughs) awaiting them in…
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Sour Party: Sparkly Colored Farts
Summary via Chattanooga Film Festival: Gwen and James are two broke, self absorbed, emotionally stunted 30-somethings, eking their way through a meager LA existence. They’ve tried everything to get rich quick from cliche artistic endeavors and failed business startups to sex work, playing the victims all the way. When Gwen realizes she forgot her older…
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New Religion: Feeling Red Grief
Summary via IMDB: Miyabi lost her only daughter in an accident. After her daughter’s death, she got a divorce. She now works as a call girl and is living with her new boyfriend. One day, she meets a weird customer who asks her to let him take a picture of her spine. She does as…
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The Last Movie Ever Made: In the End, Getting It Done Right
Summary via IMDB: With the world about to end, Marshall convinces a group of friends and strangers to help finish the sci-fi movie he abandoned in high school. Review: If the world should end, it should end with sweetness. In The Last Movie Ever Made, the last movie ever made is the one that remained…
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The Elderly: Parental Homicidal Tendencies Turn Real
Summary via IMDB: Octogenarian who enters into a state of dementia after the sudden suicide of his wife, sparking a series of paranormal events that will put his family’s lives at risk. Review: I admire filmmakers that stick to their vision no matter how weird and sordid it gets. In the Spanish horror film, The…
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Brutal Season: Death of a Family’s Soul
Summary via IMDB: In 1948, the Trouths are facing no income and the hottest summer on record. When their estranged son inexplicably returns, the apartment is full again – but is it big enough for the gambling, trauma, and substantial life insurance policy that comes in his wake? Brutal Season is a throwback drama that…