Bait

A celebration of cinema as a physical medium, this delirious whatsit from Cornish director Mark Jenkin follows Martin (Edward Rowe), a cove fisherman whose brother has started using their father’s boat to shuttle tourists. This soon causes latent familial tensions—not to mention antagonism between tourists and locals—to explode in surprising fashion. Shot on tactile hand-processed black-and-white 16mm and unfolding with the staccato rhythms of avant-garde cinema, Jenkin’s debut feature from 2019 is an idiosyncratic work of social realism fascinatingly pitched somewhere between documentary and political melodrama. A 2019 New Directors/New Films selection. A NEON release.