Sundance Film Festival: Duh, Hot Girls Make Difficult Films More Marketable

HERE

Related Content

• Hypocrisy in Hollywood: The Rich, White Males in the Film Industry Are the Real Pirates
  February 22, 2012
• Brit Marling in Sound of My Voice
  April 26, 2012
• Sundance Film Festival 2012: An Experiment
  January 18, 2012
• James Franco and Alex Israel: Why Their Obsession With Celebrity Doesn't Pay Off
  May 22, 2012
• Five Artsy Things to Do This Week, Including Sculptures of Fax Machines
  May 23, 2012

More About

• Sundance Film Festival
• Brit Marling
• Academy Awards
• Film Festivals
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media

Like this Story?

Get the Screeners: Screening previews, news, reviews and features on everything from the silver screen.

Make sign up easy with:

But no film at Sundance explored the tension between old and new media, fixed history and the uncertain future toward which wired life is hurtling, as powerfully as Braden King’s highly experimental romance HERE. Will (Ben Foster) is an American cartographer contracted to gather ground data for satellite maps in rural Armenia; he meets native Armenian photographer Gadarine (Lubna Azabal) by chance when she returns from travels abroad. As King alternates between naturalistic but sensual snapshots of their ensuing road trip and non-narrative, pure-cinematic montages, HERE encompasses themes of distance and intimacy and the moral gradients of recording fact and creating art/fiction. The couple’s common obsession with the lonely road brings them together (as does their physical chemistry), but it doesn’t change who they are or their complicated engagement with both the romantic nature of travel and its darker side — namely, conquest.

This vital, gorgeous, cerebral and deeply passionate film was the only great thing I saw at Sundance that remains without a U.S. distributor as of press time — proving, perhaps, that sex can only sell so much.