Fort Buchanan

Opens theatrically for one week only on Friday, February 5 in conjunction with Friends with Benefits: An Anthology of Four New American Filmmakers

“…signals the emergence of a filmmaker not to be missed.”
—Nicholas Elliott, Cahiers du Cinéma

“A truly original oddity, Benjamin Crotty’s Fort Buchanan melds disparate tropes of American television, queer cinema, and French arthouse to comic and dazzling effect.”
—Sarah Salovaara, Filmmaker magazine

FORT BUCHANAN is the feature debut of American-born, Paris-based writer-director Benjamin Crotty and marks the arrival of something rare in contemporary cinema: a wholly original sensibility. Expanding his 2012 short of the same name, Crotty chronicles the tragicomic plight of frail, lonely Roger, stranded at a remote military post in the woods while his husband carries out a mission in Djibouti. Over four seasons, Roger (Andy Gillet, the androgynous star of Eric Rohmer’s The Romance of Astrea and Celadon) seeks comfort and companionship from the army wives in the leisurely yet sexually frustrated community, while trying to keep a lid on his volatile adopted daughter, Roxy. Drawing inspiration from his upbringing near an American military base, Crotty crafts an absurdist melodrama that features a breakout performance by Mati Diop (army wife Justine)—a recipient of the just-announced 2016 Lincoln Center Emerging Artist Award. Shot in richly textured 16mm, Crotty’s queer soap opera playfully estranges and deranges any number of narrative conventions, finding surprising wells of emotion amid the carnal comedy. 2014 | 65m | Color | 1.78:1

An official selection of New Directors/New Films, Rotterdam, and Locarno in 2015, Fort Buchanan anchors Friends with Benefits, a showcase of young iconoclasts and collaborators Crotty, Gabriel Abrantes, Alexander Carver, and Daniel Schmidt running simultaneously.

PRESS SCREENINGS

Tuesday, January 19
10am       Fort Buchanan dir. Benjamin Crotty
11:10am  The Unity of All Things dir. Daniel Schmidt and Alexander Carver
1:00pm    Freud und Friends dir. Gabriel Abrantes

Location: Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, 144 W. 65th St.
(between Broadway and Amsterdam)

The Unity of All Things
Daniel Schmidt & Alexander Carver, USA/Switzerland/China, 2013, digital projection, 98m
English, Cantonese, and Spanish with English subtitles
This sci-fi tone poem about research physicists preparing for the construction of a new particle accelerator on the U.S.-Mexico border is a hypnotic portrait of desire, exquisitely shot on a mixture of Super 16 and Super 8, that is nothing short of cosmic.

Freud und Friends
Gabriel Abrantes, Portugal, 2015, DCP, 23m
English and Portuguese with English subtitles
A freewheeling homage to both Woody Allen’s Sleeper and reality TV, Freud und Friends is a headlong dive (narrated by “Herner Werzog”) into the deepest, silliest recesses of Abrantes’s unconscious.

To RSVP or for more information, please contact
Lisa Thomas, [email protected].