Orion Pictures and Samuel Goldwyn Films have acquired North American rights to Most Beautiful Island, a psychological thriller from Glass Eye Pix directed, written, produced by and starring Ana Asensio. It won a Grand Jury Award in the narrative competition at SXSW this year.

Shot on Super 16mm, the pic chronicles one harrowing day in the life of Luciana, a young immigrant woman struggling to make ends meet in New York while striving to escape her past. As Luciana’s day unfolds, she is whisked through a series of troublesome and unforeseeable extremes. Before her day is done, she inadvertently finds herself a central participant in a cruel game where lives are placed at risk, and psyches are twisted and broken for the perverse entertainment of a privileged few.

Natasha Romanova, David Little, Nicholas Tucci, Larry Fessenden and Caprice Benedetti co-star. Jenn Wexler, Chadd Harbold, Fessenden and Noah Greenberg produced, and Peter Phok, Jose María Garcia, Ahmet Bilgen, Selim Cevikel, Christohper Todd and Gill Holland are executive producers.

The deal was negotiated by Peter Goldwyn on behalf of Samuel Goldwyn and Andrew Herwitz and Lucas Verga of Film Sales Corp. on behalf of the filmmakers. It comes ahead of the film’s bow Wednesday at BAM Cinemafest.

Check out the article…

Fessenden continues long-standing collaboration with auteur Kelly Reichardt, serving as Executive Producer on her recent work Certain Women, out on DVD and Blu-ray this Fall. From indiewire:

“Certain Women”

“The expanses of the American Northwest take center stage in this intimately observed triptych from Kelly Reichardt. Adapted from three short stories by Maile Meloy and unfolding in self-contained but interlocking episodes, Certain Women navigates the subtle shifts in personal desire and social expectation that unsettle the circumscribed lives of its characters: a lawyer (Laura Dern) forced to subdue a troubled client; a woman (Michelle Williams) whose plans to construct her dream home reveal fissures in her marriage; and a night-school teacher (Kristen Stewart) who forms a tenuous bond with a lonely ranch hand (Lily Gladstone), whose unguardedness and deep attachment to the land deliver an unexpected jolt of emotional immediacy. With unassuming craft, Reichardt captures the rhythms of daily life in small-town Montana through these fine-grained portraits of women trapped within the landscape’s wide-open spaces.”

From Indiewire:

Ana Asensio’s SXSW winner burst onto the scene when it bowed at the festival back in March, and as it hits BAM and readies for a theatrical rollout, the timely feature will likely only garner more well-deserved attention. Our review explained, “Asensio, a thirtysomething Spanish actress whose work is virtually unseen on these shores, not only wrote, directed, and produced this fraught metropolitan thriller, she also appears in just about every frame. And while the film might begin by suggesting that its heroine was chosen at random (a mesmeric prologue follows seven different women as they weave through the sidewalks of Manhattan, the camera picking them out of a crowd as if to wordlessly reassert that most of the Naked City’s seven million stories remain untold), Asensio’s compulsively watchable lead performance splits the difference between the specific and the representational.”

See it at the NY premiere at the BAM Cinema Fest this Wednesday 6/21. Tix on sale!

From The Verge:

One of my favorite PS4 games is Until Dawn, Supermassive’s cinematic horror adventure from 2015. The game took Heavy Rain’s branching story structure and applied it to a self-aware slasher tale, which felt like a much more natural fit — even if you made the wrong call and let a character die in an gory instant, the story would just keep going. And though it was a single-player game by design, it turned out to work really well with a bunch of people on a sofa yelling frantic instructions to the player. For Supermassive’s next game, the British studio is expanding on that idea. Hidden Agenda is a new narrative-driven PS4 crime thriller that’s designed to be played with multiple players collaborating on the characters’ decisions and actions. The really neat step is that each person uses their smartphone as a controller, letting them vote on options and act on information that may not be available to everyone else.

From Gamespot:

One of the cool surprises from Sony’s E3 2017 briefing tonight was the PlayStation VR game The Inpatient. More details for the psychological horror game have now come to light, including the fact that it’s a prequel set 60 year before Supermassive’s previous game, Until Dawn.

Supermassive worked with Until Dawn writers Larry Fessenden and Graham Reznick on the story for The Inpatient. The Inpatient is one of two PlayStation VR games from Supermassive that was announced today during Sony’s E3 briefing. The other is a crime thriller called Hidden Agenda.

As Fessenden embarks on the second annual Shudder Labs Outing in Upstate NewYork with GEPals Peter Phok, Jenn Wexler, Clay MacLeod Chapman, Shudder host Sam Zimmerman and a team of horror lovers, Film School Rejects posts and aptly timed article on the streaming service. What are you waiting for?

Streaming and live-streams, and scares—oh my!

Like any self-respecting content consumer, I subscribe to an embarrassing amount of podcasts. As a result, I’ve heard my fair share of gotta-keep-the-lights-on adverts, but I’ve never been bothered to use a promo code, let alone google or buy a product. That is until I heard Elijah Wood sing the praises of Shudder, a niche, subscription-based streaming service geared to horror nerds. I’ve never opened a search bar so fast.

…

Shudder has been able to provide more than just recycled titles and low-quality indie fare. They’ve made available films that were otherwise hard to come by through the regular channels; from Larry Fessenden’s Habit to classics from F.W. Murnau. Perusing Shudder feels like being let into a fallout vault, well-stocked with everything from old favorites to genre classics, to challenging new fare.

Read more

Kelly Reichardt’s film WENDY AND LUCY starring Michelle Williams makes the grade: the Glass Eye Pix production named one of 25 Best films since 2000. From The New York Times:

In Kelly Reichardt’s “Wendy and Lucy,” a young woman named Wendy passes through a Pacific Northwest town on her way to Alaska, where she hopes to find work. She has a little bit of money, an unreliable car and her dog, Lucy. This stripped-down tale of desperation and hope in hard times – a Raymond Carver story for the Great Recession – stars Michelle Williams, who talked with A.O. Scott about the experience of making it.

How did you first come to work with Kelly Reichardt?

Michelle WilliamsMutual friends. Laura Rosenthal, the casting director – we used to live in the same neighborhood and she stalked me at the local coffee shop. And then I watched “Old Joy” [also by Ms. Reichardt] and I knew that Kelly was making the movies that I wanted to be a part of.

Was there a challenge for you in getting into that character?

Kelly is very clear about what she wants. She is a really easy collaborator because she is so precise, so things happen very quickly. You understand the place and the person very quickly because she’s very specific about what she wants. She’s still open. I would shoot her ideas and she would say, “Come back in a week when you’ve honed that thing down from your garish, stupid, big idea to something that I might actually like, Michelle.”

Her characters aren’t very expressive or easy to read. That has to be a challenge for an actor.

I find Kelly’s characters get to maintain a lot of dignity and self-respect because they aren’t always giving themselves away. And I find that kind of tricky. It’s an incredibly fine line to walk. Is anybody going to know me? Is anybody going to understand who I am as this person? Are they going to care? Is there going to be a there, there?

And for Kelly’s language, for her sensibility, there is. These characters don’t feel compelled to explain themselves. You have to sort of train your ear and your eye and get to know them slowly. It’s like not sleeping with someone on the first date when you watch her movies. You’re like, let me take a little time to get to know you and absorb you.

“Wendy and Lucy” came out at the end of 2008, right in the middle of the election campaign and the economic collapse. There’s a powerful sense that while the movie is very much about this one young woman and her situation, it’s also about a lot more than that.

All of Kelly’s movies are political, but you would have to maybe have been told that to be aware of it. She’s able to slip it into everything she does, but it’s never didactic or heavy-handed. It’s an essential part of who Kelly is. She’s interested in a lot of genres, but the backbone of it is, how do people get along? How do people get by?

Full list here…

All the news on the production here: Rue Morgue, Dread Central