The A24 logo appears on screen and... you know everything will be fine. The American studio has maintained a high standard for years, deftly combining best elements of arthouse and genre cinema. Films they produce have made red carpets their homes (prime example: 7 Oscars for Everything Everywhere All at Once), but they have not lost their auteurist, independent sparkle.
We are all the more pleased to boast as many as four titles from A24, which will be on this year's New Horizons programme: Julio Torres's Problemista, Aaron Schimberg's A Different Man, Jane Schoenbrun's I Saw the TV Glow and Rungano Nyoni's On Becoming a Guinea Fowl. The last one, after being screened at the Festival, will get wide cinema distribution thanks to the New Horizons Association. This is the first A24 title in our hands, so we recommend it all the more. Join the screenings!
The 24th mBank New Horizons International Festival starts in less than a month: this year's edition runs from 18 to 28 July (and you can invite the festival into your homes through online screenings until 4 August). On 2 July, we will announce the full programme, and two days later ticket and online access sales will begin.
On becoming a guinea fowl
The Cannes directing prize and the latest work from the studio A24, which has taken the talented author of the acclaimed I Am Not a Witch (NH 17) under its protection. Once again, Zambia-born Rungano Nyoni mixes realism with poeticism and surrealism with naturalism, drawing a portrait of a local community unable to escape toxic tradition, the cult of the family and the iron-fisted patriarchy, which relegates women to the role of servants and child bearers. Somewhere there rebellion, or at least laughter, is lurking. Nothing but become a guinea fowl... Nyoni's second, electrifying film is fresh and powerful feminist cinema of reckoning.
A Different Man: the best worst man in the world
A budding actor, Edward (Berlinale award-winner Sebastian Stan) is perhaps the greatest cabot in the world cinema since the creation of the conceited writer from Petzold's Afire. Suffering from neurofibromatosis, the man holds a perpetual grudge against the world, and blames all his failures on the disease that has deformed his face. But what if – as a result of a prank by a malicious demiurge, Edward was deprived of his comfortable alibi and endowed with the appeal of a Hollywood hunk? A Different Man is both a universal parable about the problems of defining one's own identity and a thoroughly contemporary satire on a world that constantly encourages us to create the best version of ourselves.
I Saw the TV Glow: small screen, big love
Another film this year with Emma Stone as a producer, supporting young filmmakers at the start of their artistic journey. I Saw the TV Glow by Jane Schoenbrun (known for We Are All Going to the World's Fair and other productions screened at the American Film Festival) was hailed by the New Yorker’ Richard Brody as ‘a profound vision of the trans experience’. As in their previous film, Schoenbrun transforms their own experiences of identity entangled with pop culture visions, into a psychological drama with elements of horror. Owen (Justice Smith) meets the two years older gay Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine known from Netflix Atypical), with whom he shares a fascination for the TV series The Pink Opaque, about a pair of girls who use magic to fight monsters. The characters' situation becomes complicated when the series is taken off air.
Problemista: the art of survival with Tilda Swinton
We all love Tilda Swinton, even when she plays another monster – a dishevelled dealer of every possible type of modern art (but especially the expensive and spectacular one). Well, all except perhaps her new assistant, who will survive anything to fulfil his endangered American Dream and stay in New York. Julio Torres (the El Salvador-born comedian) has packed a lot of his own expatriate experience into this surreal comedy.
