First Time Fest, a film festival that celebrates and supports first time filmmakers, wrapped up its second edition on April 7 with a closing night awards ceremony held at 42West nightclub. During the festival, besides Josephine Decker's psychological horror film
Butter on the Latch (read my review
here), I was able to catch three other great features.
Tommy Oliver's 1982, set in Philadelphia in the titular year at the onset of the crack epidemic, is a semi-autobiographical and emotionally moving film featuring a great central performance by Hill Harper. Harper plays a man struggling to raise his daughter while dealing with his wife's raging crack addiction, and the film itself has beautiful visual textures and a realistic-feeling sense of its time and place.
Rok Bicek's Class Enemy, from Slovenia, deals with a group of students who stage a revolt against their new German professor, a strict and demanding man they hold responsible for their classmate's suicide. With expertly calibrated tension and impressively acted by nonprofessionals, Class Enemy is a much more nuanced and complex film than its premise would suggest.
Drew Tobia's See You Next Tuesday follows the seriously dysfunctional family life of an extremely pregnant grocery-store clerk with emotionally fraught relationships with her sister and her recovering alcoholic mother. It may be initially off-putting, because its style is so aggressively abrasive and its characters often come off as almost grotesquely unpleasant, but its skewed comic rhythms possess their own weird charm, and it leads to a conclusion that's actually kind of touching.
At the awards ceremony, the jury prizes were presented, and Julie Taymor was presented with the 2014 John Huston Award for Outstanding Achievement in Cinema, presented by her composer and long-time partner Elliot Goldenthal.
Click through the gallery below for the other First Time Fest award winners, with quotes from the jury about the films. This year's jury consisted of Nicholas Haden-Guest (actor), Anne-Katrin Titze (film critic at Eye For Film), and Stephanie Zacharek (Village Voice chief film critic).
LOVE STEAKS (Germany, directed by Jakob Lass)
Grand Prize Winner of Theatrical Distribution by Cinema Libre Studio and Scandinavian Trip and Writers Retreat from Scandinavian Locations
"A beautiful love story, told with candor, that evokes the behind-the-scenes madness of the restaurant and resort world. Funny, audacious, touching, and brilliantly acted and directed."
Award For Outstanding Achievement in Editing
Edited by Gesa Jager, "whose editing work - lively, adventurous, and precise - brilliantly captures both the breakneck pace of restaurant work and the more languorous, tentative pace of budding romance."
1982 (USA, directed by Tommy Oliver)
Special Jury Prize
"A man struggles to keep his family together in a threatening environment, a Philadelphia neighborhood of the early 1980s. Deeply evocative of a specific area and place, 1982 shows a bold, imaginative spirit."
Award For Outstanding Achievement In Acting
Hill Harper, whose "portrayal of a father who takes action to protect his family in early-'80s Philadelphia is simultaneously tender and tough-minded, an intimate and ultimately glorious performance."
BITTERSWEET (Netherlands, directed by Marieke Niestadt)
Award For Outstanding Achievement In Directing
"A disarming and beautifully constructed documentary that opens up the world of women's boxing and, more specifically, charts one woman's experience in that brutal, challenging world."
FAREWELL, HERR SCHWARZ (Germany/Israel, directed by Yael Reuveny)
Award For Outstanding Achievement In Storytelling
"For its evocative use of language in telling the story of one woman's exploration of painful family truths."
THE SLEEPWALKER (Norway/USA, directed by Mona Fastvold)
Award For Outstanding Achievement In Cinematography
Zachary Galler, "whose subtle, gorgeous visuals set the tone for a tense drama in which four individuals stumble into a web of unsettling secrets."
Award For Outstanding Achievement In Scoring
Score by Sondre Lerche and Kato Adland. "For its evocative and original approach to storytelling through sound, sounds that linger after you've gone."