LITTLE BIRDS is the definition of a Sundance misfire: the films I put on my “must-see” list every year, simply because they feature my favorite young indie stars. In years past, I’ve been drawn in by the likes of Joe Gordon-Levitt, Zooey Deschanel, Lou Taylor Pucci, and others. This year’s honor goes to my current “indie girl” crush, Juno Temple (also at the fest for Gregg Araki’s fun-filled apocalypse revisit, KABOOM!). Little Birds revolves around the complicated friendship of two 15-year-old girls (Temple and young actress Kay Pannabaker, perhaps known from Hollywood’s recent remake of Fame) who go on a journey only to find out that there really is no place like home. Despite interesting supporting performances from Kate Bosworth and Leslie Mann (who get their hands dirty playing trailer park trash) and another of the fest’s male “it” boys, a sweet Kyle Gallner (also in town for Kevin Smith’s Red State) who plays Temple’s love interest, this tale of innocence lost couldn’t even begin to trigger anything that resembled empathy from my emo heart.
An unflinching Ozark Mountain girl hacks through dangerous social terrain as she hunts down her drug-dealing father while trying to keep her family intact.
György Mór Kárpáti (1984) is a graduate student of the University of Theatre and Film, in Ildikó Enyedi’s class, where FOREST was his 4th year diploma film. “A murder is committed in the forest. A young man becomes caught up in the events, and this experience has an increasingly unsettling effect on him.”
“Asked for a description of her work, Sassen has more than one used the phrase “creating order out of chaos.” This rather factual indication is linked to the technique of her craft and her stylised manner of representing. For a photograph brings life to a halt, causing development and movement to become solidified. The use of bright, contrasting colors and a highly developed graphic eye for surface divisions, lines and relationships lend Sassen’s work an unmistakably aesthetic character. It is pervaded with a timeless beauty inextricably connected with an underlying visual hierarchy that seems sculptural”. From the epilogue by Edo Dijksterhuis