Friends with Benefits: An Anthology of Four New American Filmmakers
In less than a decade of activity, Gabriel Abrantes, Alexander Carver, Benjamin Crotty, and Daniel Schmidt have collectively established themselves as a school of filmmaking unlike any other: uncompromising visionaries with a penchant for provocation, a taste for transgression, and a host of singular strategies and obsessions. The Film Society welcomes these playful iconoclasts for their first-ever shared retrospective, which includes the U.S. theatrical release of Crotty’s first feature, Fort Buchanan.
In less than a decade of activity, Gabriel Abrantes, Alexander Carver, Benjamin Crotty, and Daniel Schmidt have collectively established themselves as a school of filmmaking unlike any other: uncompromising visionaries with a penchant for provocation, a taste for transgression, and a host of singular strategies and obsessions. The Film Society welcomes these playful iconoclasts for their first-ever shared retrospective, which includes the U.S. theatrical release of Crotty’s first feature, Fort Buchanan.
Lineup
Benjamin Crotty
2014|
France / Tunisia|
65 minutes|
French with English subtitles
Shot in richly textured 16mm, Crotty’s queer soap opera chronicles the tragicomic plight of frail, lonely Roger, who seeks comfort and companionship from the sexually frustrated army wives in a remote military post in the woods while his husband carries out a mission in Djibouti. A New Directors/New Films 2015 selection.
Daniel Schmidt
2013|
USA / Switzerland / China|
98 minutes|
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.
86 minutes
Portuguese poet Luís Vaz de Camões, screen legend Edith Scob, and a narrator named “Herner Werzog” factor in Abrantes’s three most recent shorts—ribald and irreverent films that mark his recent swerve toward popular comedy.
72 minutes
A collection of five early shorts full of camp and ambition, including two early collaborations by Gabriel Abrantes and Benjamin Crotty that take us from Iraq to Angola, and Abrantes’s first film, Olympia I & II, co-directed with Katie Widloski, a seductive tongue-in-cheek riff on Manet’s canonical painting.
82 minutes
Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt’s first two collaborations—one a radically stylized amalgam of coming-of-age melodrama and political allegory, the other cast against lush jungle settings and the modernist architecture of Brasilia—are sublime stories of friendship and betrayal spanning the medieval past to a dystopian future.
79 minutes
In this program of adaptations of classic and ancient texts, Aristophanes, Shakespeare, and the oral tradition of Puerto Rico’s indigenous Taíno people are subjected to the whims and perversions of Abrantes, Carver, and Schmidt.
In less than a decade of activity, the four friends and polymorphously promiscuous collaborators Gabriel Abrantes, Alexander Carver, Benjamin Crotty, and Daniel Schmidt have made some of the most ravishing and least classifiable films in recent memory—and established themselves as a school of filmmaking unlike any other. These uncompromising young visionaries share a penchant for provocation, a taste for transgression, and a host of strategies and obsessions all their own. At once lyrical and perverse, by turns hilarious and delirious, their films obliterate distinctions—between high- and low-brow, between sensual and cerebral, between art cinema and the avant-garde—while remaining sharply attuned to the byproducts of globalization and the fluctuations of post-internet pop culture. The Film Society welcomes these playful iconoclasts for their first-ever shared retrospective, which includes the U.S. theatrical release of Crotty’s first feature, Fort Buchanan.
Don’t miss two Brooklyn events with the filmmakers, Lifestyle Porn Parts 1 and 2, at Light Industry on February 2 and Spectacle on February 9.
Organized by Dennis Lim and Dan Sullivan. Presented with support from MUBI and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.
