The Santa Barbara International Film Festival (SBIFF) announced its winning films at a ceremony this morning in Santa Barbara.

“This 38^th edition of the Santa Barbara International Film Festival drew filmmakers from as far as Turkey, India, Israel, and Sierra Leone, half of whom were women,” said SBIFF’s Programming Director, Claudia Puig. “We were delighted with the enthusiastic reception to our diverse program of 200 films from 43 countries. Cinema is one of the most powerful vehicles for empathy, providing a window of understanding to all who seek to look through it.  We thank the filmmakers in attendance and our avid Santa Barbara audience for so heartily embracing the festival experience. Several films prompted standing ovations and packed theaters, marking 2023 a full-throttled return to celebrating cinema from around the globe.”

The 38th Santa Barbara International Film Festival took place February 8 – February 18. Official events included screenings, filmmaker Q&As, industry panels, and celebrity tributes, held throughout the city, including at the historic Arlington Theatre. 

The films were chosen by jury members Angie Wang, Antonio Marziale, Christina Birro, Elizabeth Marighetto Gwen Deglise, Jean Oppenheimer, Jeff Arch, Lela Meadow Conner, Leslie Ekker, Margy Rochlin, Nicole Noren, Perry Lang, Robert Abele, Steven Raphael, Tim Cogshell, and Tim Matheson.

Winners in the competition:

Audience Choice Award sponsored by The Santa Barbara Independent: 26.2 TO LIFE Directed by Christine Yoo

Panavision Spirit Award for Independent Cinema: I LIKE MOVIES Directed by Chandler Levack

Jeffrey C. Barbakow Award – Best International Feature Film: A MAN (ARU OTOKO) Directed by Kei Ishikawa

Best Documentary Award: A BUNCH OF AMATEURS Directed by Kim Hopkins

Nueva Vision Award for Spain/Latin America Cinema: MANUELA Directed by Clara Cullen

Best Middle Eastern/Israeli Film Award: THE TASTE OF APPLES IS RED (TA’AM AL TUFAH, AHMAR) Directed by Ehab Tarabieh

Best Nordic Film Award: SUMMERLIGHT AND THEN COMES THE NIGHT (SUMARLJÓS OG SVO KEMUR NÓTTIN) Directed by Elfar Aðalsteins

Social Justice Award for Documentary Film: BLACK MAMBAS Directed by Lena Karbe

ADL Stand Up Award, sponsored by ADL Santa Barbara/Tri-Counties, the Skinner Social Impact Fund, and Steve & Cindy Lyons: THE QUIET GIRL (AN CAILÍN CIÚIN) Directed by Colm Bairéad

Best Documentary Short Film Award: NOWHERE TO GO BUT EVERYWHERE (行き止まりのむこう側) Directed by Masako Tsumura, Erik Shirai

Bruce Corwin Award – Best Live-Action Short Film: THE MOISTURE (RUTUBET) Directed by Turan Haste

*Now eligible for the 2024 Academy Awards

Bruce Corwin Award – Best Animated Short Film: EPICENTER (소문의 진원지) Directed by Heeyoon Hahm

*Now eligible for the 2024 Academy Awards

“Euphoria” and “The White Lotus” star Sydney Sweeney communicated with the real-life Reality Winner to portray her in Tina Satter’s “Reality,” which world premieres at the Berlin Film Festival.

The film, which contains verbatim dialogue from the unedited transcript of an FBI audio recording, follows a tense 90 minutes in the life of whistleblower Winner as the FBI interrogate at her home in 2017. Winner, a former U.S. Air Force member and National Security Agency translator, was sentenced to five years in prison after she leaked an intelligence report to the media.

“I had the honor and privilege to be able actually communicate with Reality. I was able to Zoom with her — Tina connected us — and I would text her throughout the process,” Sweeney told a press conference at Berlin on Saturday.

“And before even I got it, when I was auditioning, I went and found as many interviews that I could of Reality so that I could watch how she speaks, how she moves, her different mannerisms. And I took that into the audition,” Sweeney said. “So then when Tina, connected us I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is a dream for an actor, because I’m actually getting to speak to the real person, I’m getting to dive more into their mind and and what she’s gone through in her life.’”

Also present at the conference were Satter and the Sweeney’s costars Jo-sh Hamilton and Marchant Davis, who play FBI agents. Hamilton and Davis spoke about the difficulty of learning verbatim dialogue but also said that not following a written fiction script was a freeing experience.

“I want the story to help tell Reality Winner’s story,” Satter said. Satter, a celebrated playwright who adapted the FBI transcript into the verbatim theater performance “Is This a Room” before turning it into a film.

“One of the most key things to this that would be interesting for more people in the United States and around the world to understand is the Espionage Act under which she [Winner] was charged, which is an act from 1917 about containing a flow of information — before the digital age,” Satter said. “And so it’s a really old law that there’s no way to defend against. That’s actually a really relevant and interesting thing for people in the United States to understand that’s still being deployed and what that means for all of us living in a democracy.”

Mk2 is handling world sales.

Consistently apply Generative AI to every frame of a moving image with Runway Research.

Whether it’s due to its ability to harness just about any style or it can create new art with the input of a few word suggestions, AI-generated art is taking the internet by storm.  

Now, the creators of Stable Diffusion have released a new technique called “Video to Video,” which applies generative AI techniques to video to create original works by using a few words to apply the style or image to the structure of original source video. It will be a powerful pre-production tool in the near future.

AI Tools Put To Good Use

“AI systems for image and video synthesis are quickly becoming more precise, realistic, and controllable,” states the Runway Research website. “Runway Research is at the forefront of these developments and is dedicated to ensuring the future of creativity is accessible, controllable, and empowering for all.”

The new app is called Gen-1 by Runway, and it uses a structure and content-guided video diffusion model to edit videos based on visual or textual descriptions for a desired output. The technique, which Runway calls Video to Video, applies AI-generated features to entire videos to create otherworldly and creative works.  

Today, Generative AI takes its next big step forward.

Introducing Gen-1: a new AI model that uses language and images to generate new videos out of existing ones.

Sign up for early research access: https://t.co/7JD5oHrowP pic.twitter.com/4Pv0Sk4exy

— Runway (@runwayml) February 6, 2023

AI Tools For A Variety of Image Modes

Building on the shoulders of their still image AI engines Latent and Stable Diffusion, Gen-1 is capable of consistently applying any image style and composition to every frame of a video with five separate modes, depending on the desired outcome. These modes are: 

Stylization Mode: Where users can transfer the style of any image or prompt to any frame of a video.

Storyboard Mode: Turning still image mockups into fully animated and stylized video renders.

Mask Mode: Where elements of a still image can be isolated and modified without changing the element’s surroundings.

Render Mode: Where 3D renders can be animated and modified with a desired style to create realistic, animated works.

Customization Mode: Where every element can be customized further for a unique, high-fidelity original video work.

All work is done without having to build out in the physical world and still present a story idea before going before the cameras. It could be a game changer for generating pre-production animatics and testing CGI before moving to a more costly next level.

“It’s like filming something new, without filming anything at all,” states the Gen-1 website.

A Valuable Pre-Production Tool 

With these powerful tools, filmmakers will be able to generate storyboards and video animatics through the use of AI to create or alter them in seconds. The Gen-1 Video to Video engine will be able to reduce the time spent creating videos for exploring new ideas and concepts without having to labor over creating complex animatics or building actual set pieces before shooting.

Look at storyboard mode. They literally just put up a few notebooks to stand in for buildings, wrote a few descriptions of what they wanted the Gen-1 AI to create, and within a few seconds, they had an animated cityscape with an artistic flair, or using 3D models that have been rigged and animated and then applying a few descriptive words to create a realistic motion video that doesn’t have to rely on expensive motion capture studios or riggings.

The Future of Creation

While many of the AI-based stories have showcased the sheer power of machine learning to create original works, the Gen-1 Video to Video AI-based tool uses that power in a way that supplements the video content creator without replacing them. As it grows in its ability to generate a video to the video image, filmmakers are sure to find new and interesting ways to create original content with it.

With Gen-1, content creators don’t need to worry that they may soon be replaced, in fact, this tool may help get them where they want to go.

To request access to the Runway Gen-1 “chatbot,” visit the Runway Research website.     

With this year’s selection, the Berlinale seems to be creating space in the festival calendar, between Sundance and SXSW, for a particular type of American indie: the melancholy, slight, intensely personal and hence rather divisive kind, in which vaguely famous actors—usually the comedic kind—play downbeat iterations of their more familiar selves. It may not be a coincidence that Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg debuted here rather than home turf in 2010, but Dustin Guy Defa’s The Adults, which premiered in the festival’s Encounters strand, makes Baumbach’s problem child seem positively commercial by comparison. Fortunately for all involved, Universal have already picked it up; this is definitely not the type of movie to thrive in today’s marketplace.

It begins in a hotel room, where Eric (Michael Cera) is making plans to see an old friend after three years away. Eric’s attempts to breeze back into town and pick up where he left off fall embarrassingly short, but he does connect with an old poker buddy who puts him in touch with some local players. It says something about Eric that he does this before visiting his sisters, Rachel (Hannah Gross) and Maggie (Sophia Lillis), who are excited to see him but clearly realistic about the amount of time he plans to stay there. Sure enough, Eric is only there for a flying visit, until the poker circle widens and he hears about a high-stakes game that appeals to the card-sharp that lies beneath his easygoing exterior.

The title of the film is somewhat ironic since the real adults of the story—the siblings’ parents—are long gone and there are clearly issues that not been dealt with (the fact that Rachel lives in their mother’s old house is obviously triggering to Eric). In the absence of any parental figure, the three struggle to connect with each other, mostly by reverting to childhood, reiterating old jokes and songs that fill in the spaces that otherwise might be taken up by proper conversation. But even that doesn’t fill the void any more (“You used to think I was the funniest person in the world,” Eric laments).

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Defa’s film does not exactly race to the finish line, struggling to fill 88 minutes with the delicate to-and-fro of whether or not they will ever, finally, communicate. Before long, weapons-grade levels of whimsy start to intrude, and the film’s intriguing, charged atmosphere is suddenly obliterated by a scene in which the three dredge up strange imaginary characters they created as kids: Hannah is “Wug-wug”, Rachel is “Mopey-mopey” and Eric is “Charles”, an English gent from the Dick Van Dyke school of elocution. They will do this again later, at a party, but this time more seriously, arguing in shrill baby voices that may well drive out those who don’t leave after the interpretative dance sequence—to “Overkill”, an ’80s US hit for Australia’s Men at Work—that follows. For reference, only the talking cat Paw-Paw in Miranda July’s The Future has ever previously scaled such heights of arthouse annoyance.

Defa’s last film, Person to Person (2017), suffered from a similar lack of substance but it did achieve what it set out to do, which was to present a characterful portrait of New York in a picaresque hipster style reminiscent of the city’s No Wave heyday. It also proved that Defa has a good eye for casting; even though Cera plays the character that takes us into the story, he is quickly upstaged by Gross and Lillis. A more pressing criticism, though, is that The Adults is a comedy-drama that doesn’t seem to deliver much of either, and that gray, in-between state just isn’t appealing anymore. Could it be that the cinema of awkwardness, or mumblecore in different clothes, has finally reached its sell-by date?

Depending on the state of your own family network, the relationship between the trio of grown siblings at the center of “The Adults” may strike you as intensely, skin-crawlingly familiar or quite desolately alien. Either way, Dustin Guy Defa’s determinedly quiet family-reunion drama seeks to be discomfiting, gradually giving the viewer that hollow, lurching, pit-of-the-stomach feeling that either precedes a dreaded encounter or follows a disappointing one. That might not sounds like a good thing, but in the context of this small, expansively sad film, it is one: From that queasiness comes bristly tension, tautening and deepening what otherwise seems a low-key, low-stakes character study, and eventually a sweet, conciliatory sliver of hope too.

Defa’s previous feature, 2017’s meandering, windblown New York City mosaic “Person to Person,” was already a tiny microbudget enterprise, so it wouldn’t quite be accurate to describe “The Adults,” with its more contained ensemble and thematic thrust, as a smaller film still. But it is a tighter one, with a short, slightly elastic, day-by-day framework that sharpens the behind-the-beat hesitations and anxious, by-design lulls of Defa’s writing. He remains an acquired taste. For every person who was charmed by “Person to Person’s” shuffling intimacy, there was at least one other who found it too precious by half. That will likely apply to “The Adults” too, which makes no apology for the shared, outgrown precociousness of several characters here. You don’t have to like people to see some truth in them. Defa, it seems, happily accepts that trade-off.

As in “Person to Person,” Michael Cera’s signature diffident awkwardness as a performer is key to Defa’s uneasy tone, though some things have subtly changed. Now in his mid-thirties, Cera hasn’t been seen in the movies — not counting some voice work — in five years, and there’s now the barest hint of wear and tear in his soft, boyish demeanor. “The Adults,” its title dripping with irony, shrewdly casts a performer who once seemed eternally adolescent as a notional grown-up who hasn’t yet found his feet, his youthful vacillation just beginning to calcify into a permanent adult vagueness.

The screenplay is pointedly short on details about his character, Eric, as he arrives from Portland for a few days’ stay in his grayly autumnal East Coast hometown. But the blanks become telling. We know nothing of Eric’s job, though his lax approach to scheduling leads us to assume he’s either self-employed or unemployed, nor of his social network back home, though we gradually surmise it’s not up to much. (Nobody, it seems, is ever trying to reach him.) He’s fond of telling people his travel plans are flexible due to his VIP status with the airline, which doesn’t create the high-rolling impression he hopes for; he checks into a boxy business hotel, though his family home, with its surfeit of empty rooms, is nearby.

His parents, it emerges, have been dead several years; the house is now owned and occupied by his older sister Rachel (a superb Hannah Gross), a caustic radio producer whose jaundiced worldview emerges as wry sarcasm with her friends, only to turn overtly hostile in her brother’s presence. Jokes and routines that once bonded them as children now only amplify the echoing space between them as they dutifully hang out after three years apart — there’s no mention of the global pandemic, but the rusting effects of social distancing are perhaps one factor at play here. Eric is equally reluctant to spend quality time with his former best friend, now boasting a newborn baby he’s in no hurry to meet; avoiding both friends and family, he instead sets up a poker game with vague acquaintances indifferent to his presence in town.

Strenuously playing peacemaker between Eric and Rachel, meanwhile, is their younger sister Maggie (Sophia Lillis, at once sprightly and nervy). A fey college dropout, she masks her dismay at her brother’s scant displays of affection by insistently resurrecting the siblings’ former modes and codes of communication: roleplay with hyper-affected voices, teasing mind games, a veritable revue of made-up songs and accompanying dances. Her older siblings glumly play along, forging the conspiratorial intimacy they can barely remember feeling, though occasionally, in irregular flashes, some semblance of closeness and complicity comes to them, as if via sense memory.

“The Adults” is most moving in its understanding of the trivial quips, asides and slight, splintered anecdotes that are sometimes all that remains between adult relatives who once shared richer connective tissue. In one lovely scene, complete with aptly ungainly, Godard-referencing choreography, a forgotten Men at Work hit from the 1980s is what it finally takes to get this discordant trio momentarily back in sync — a hand-me-down, one presumes, from their parents’ music collection, meaningless outside the walls of the home they once shared. Elsewhere, Gross’ sharp, flinty resistance and Lillis’ easily-bruised, eager-to-please adaptability work as opposite foils to Cera’s undemonstrative, man-in-the-middle stiffness: They’re nothing alike, but you can squint and make out the family positions they once held.

With its flatly prosaic visual language and preponderance of brittle, tentative silences, “The Adults” gives viewers ample room to imagine what brought these once eccentrically connected siblings to this unhappy point — be it some specifically loaded source of trauma or just everyday personal drift. There’s some dead air in the filmmaking here, though it doesn’t feel overly generous to match that to the characters’ own stifled sense of internal stasis, an extended wait for a life cue that may never come. It’s something they don’t quite realize (or are too stubborn to admit) they still have in common.

In 2018, Searching introduced audiences everywhere to the screen life genre — where stories unfold entirely on screens, from computers to cellphones to smartwatches, security cameras, and more. Now, the creators of Searching have delivered a new edge-of-your-seat mystery in its sequel Missing, proving once again that the digital world makes for compelling filmmaking.

This post was written by Meagan Keane and originally appeared on Adobe blog on Feb. 2, 2023.

To bring their clever computer-screen thriller to life, the filmmakers turned to Adobe Creative Cloud.

Written and directed by Nick Johnson and Will Merrick, Missing blends a star-studded cast with technological triumphs to captivate the viewer. When Grace — played by Nia Long — disappears while on vacation in Colombia with a new boyfriend, her teenage daughter June — portrayed by Storm Reid — turns to the internet in her search for answers. Stuck thousands of miles away in Los Angeles, June uses the latest technology to find her mom before it’s too late.

Like June, the filmmakers relied on innovative tech to craft a tale told entirely through digital devices.

“Making a screen-life film required us to edit, build shots, and design thousands of graphics simultaneously,” said editors Arielle Zakowski and Austin Keeling. “We needed tools that were fast, flexible, and collaborative. Without Premiere Pro, After Effects, Frame.io, and the entire Adobe Creative Cloud, this film would not exist.”

Zakowski and Keeling’s workflow took full advantage of the interoperability of Adobe Creative Cloud software. The editors mocked up graphics with Photoshop and Illustrator, before dynamically linking the content over to After Effects for final assembly. While cutting the film in Premiere Pro, the editorial team relied on the tool’s most popular features — from Motion Graphics templates to the Sensei-powered Morph Cut — to bring each element on screen to life. The pair also used Productions in Premiere Pro to remotely collaborate with each other and the film’s assistant editors, while turning to Frame.io’s cloud-based review and approvals platform to garner feedback from directors, producers, and studio team at Sony Pictures.

Missing, now playing in theaters nationwide, tells an equally fascinating story behind-the-scenes as it does on screen. Read on to hear more from editors Zakowski and Keeling about how they created the new gripping screenlife film.

How and where did you first learn to edit?

Keeling: I found my family’s old video camera when I was 11 or 12 and quickly started experimenting with making little short films. I fell in love with the process, especially bringing the final project to life through editing. I taught myself how to edit when I was young and transitioned to Premiere Pro when I started high school. I’ve stuck with Premiere ever since!

Zakowski: I’m pretty sure the first thing I ever edited was a video I made for my sister’s Bat Mitzvah when I was in high school. That might have actually been the first moment when I realized I liked editing, though I doubt I really knew what editing was! Then when I was 18, I interned at a tiny editing company where they essentially left me in a room with a computer, and I taught myself how to use the editing software.

How do you begin a project and set up your workspace?

We started working on this film during the height of the pandemic, so we were editing from the familiarity of our homes. Once production wrapped we transitioned to an office, bringing with us some personal touches (photos of cats, oil diffusers, notebooks, etc.) to make the often-bare editing rooms a little cozier. We were working in rooms next door to each other, so we each imported our own keyboard shortcuts, set up the window layouts the way we liked, and plugged in our mouse (for Austin) and Wacom tablet (for Arielle). Within a matter of minutes, we were ready to keep working away!

Check out this BTS footage from @sonypictures #missingmovie – out now and made in @AdobeVideo! | #PremierePro https://t.co/NXugJzCiX9 pic.twitter.com/UTXJtm6F8u

— Adobe Video & Motion (@AdobeVideo) January 24, 2023

Tell us about a favorite scene or moment from this project and why it stands out to you.

This whole project stands out because it was so different from anything else we’d ever done. A lot of our favorite scenes to work on were the ones that pushed beyond the craft of “traditional” editing. There’s one scene in particular toward the end of the film that is told entirely through screen elements with no live footage of the characters and no lines spoken at all. This was a really fun challenge for us to create the tension and suspense from scratch, using only the animation of the mouse, the pacing of the shots, and choices with our in-screen “camera” to determine how the scene unfolded.

What were some specific post-production challenges you faced that were unique to your project? How did you go about solving them?

Because the whole film is told through computer and phone screens, this project posed a ton of post-production challenges from the very beginning. None of the film is screen-recorded — we needed the freedom to alter each app, web page, and mouse movement to fit our needs, so we had to recreate every element seen on screen. This allowed us to make creative and storytelling changes down to the pixel level and ensure that every frame is true-to-life and genuinely “pause-proof.” Figuring out the workflow and juggling such a huge array of assets was a massive puzzle, but we really think it pays off in the finished film!

What Adobe tools did you use on this project and why did you originally choose them? Why were they the best choice for this project?

The real question is, which Adobe tools didn’t we use?! We started our editing process in Premiere Pro, taking screenshots of apps on our computer and bringing them into Photoshop to modify them as needed for the scene. We used Productions which made it so easy to share sequences back and forth with each other and for our Assistant Editors to send us media or access our timelines instantly.

As we got close to picture locking, we used Illustrator to build all of our graphics from scratch, creating vectorized assets that would remain crystal clear no matter how much we needed to zoom in on them. Once we were locked, we dynamic linked each scene over to After Effects, where we replaced the temp graphics with the hi-res ones, relinked the offline footage to the graded video, and added a crazy amount of detail to each shot – things like handheld camera shake, blurring and vignetting, and motion sketching every single mouse move to give it a lifelike, organic feel. We rendered DPX sequences right out of After Effects to assemble the final movie. Missing honestly couldn’t exist without the use of Creative Cloud’s tools, so it was our #1 (and only) choice from day 1.

We also used Frame.io throughout the entire process. While we were working from home during the pandemic, we would upload our work-in-progress edits to the directors almost every day. They would review them and often leave notes directly in Frame.io for us to execute the next day. Once we were all working together in the office, we used Frame.io to send cuts of scenes and/or the entire film to producers and the studio. Frame.io is great for shuttling large files, so our Assistant Editors also used it to upload tons of assets when it was time to work with our graphics vendors and sound teams.

What do you like about Premiere Pro, and/or any of the other tools you used?

Premiere Pro especially allowed us to move quickly during the edit. Many of our scenes consisted of 40+ layers of graphical elements, so being able to intuitively navigate through that madness was a huge help.

We used adjustment layers with transform effects to create each of the “shots” in the movie, and we were able to edit changes rapidly and without issue. We used MOGRTs (Motion Graphics templates) to mock out all the typing in Premiere Pro, which let us control the timing and speed to communicate what the characters are feeling. We also had to rough out a lot of temp split screens and VFX shots during the edit, and Premiere Pro’s tools allowed us to seamlessly incorporate these elements.

What’s your hidden gem/favorite workflow tip in Adobe Creative Cloud?

We used so many aspects of so many different Adobe programs, it’s hard to pinpoint just one! That said, using the Proxy Workflow was amazing, as it allowed us to toggle between our proxies and the raw material with the click of a button. This not only helped us keep an eye on the resolution of our footage when we were doing some extreme punch-ins during the edit, but also made our lives much easier when it came time to online all the footage for finishing in After Effects (especially since we were the ones onlining the film!). Premiere Productions was also our MVP because of how easy it made sharing sequences and media between our entire post team.

Who is your creative inspiration and why?
Each other! Just kidding. On this project we have to give it to Nick Johnson and Will Merrick, who directed Missing but were the editors of the first film, Searching. They were the ones who essentially invented this workflow on the first movie and were our guiding lights on this project. Both of them were incredibly patient with us as we learned the ropes on this film and were always happy to share their massive wealth of knowledge with the team. Forever grateful to be the editors’ editors!

What’s the toughest thing you’ve had to face in your career and how did you overcome it? What advice do you have for aspiring filmmakers or content creators?
Transitions are always a really difficult moment in this industry, whether that’s a transition from assistant editor to editor, from documentary to narrative, or from indie to studio film. There’s often a moment of internal doubt as you wonder if you can really do it, combined with an external pressure to prove to everyone that you can. We’ve both had moments like this throughout our careers and probably will continue to, but going into the office each day, sitting down at the computer, and keeping yourself focused on the work itself often helps silence the mental noise and reminds us that we love doing what we do. It’s all about knowing your worth and not allowing the inner saboteur to keep you from putting yourself out there.

Share a photo of where you work. What’s your favorite thing about your workspace and why?

We had a really nice view of Los Angeles from our offices, and lots of big windows (especially in the corner office that we were lucky to get). A lot of editing happens in dark little rooms, so getting to work in these spacious rooms (with a reminder that there was an outside world just beyond the window) was a real treat! #EditorsDeserveWindows.

There’s a rich history of movies being entirely at odds with their cryptic titles—step forward Quantum of Solace—but for his follow-up to The Wound, South African director John Trengrove has picked a doozy, a title that sounds more like a dystopian Adam Sandler comedy than the dour story of urban disintegration that it actually is. Images of star Jesse Eisenberg sporting a mop of red hair for the film have been also something of a misdirect, perhaps giving some the impression that Manodrome, which premiered in Competition at the Berlin Film Festival, could be some kind of satirical emo Fight Club for sad-sacks. Fight Club comparisons actually do turn out to be (lightly) relevant, as are callbacks to Taxi Driver, but Manodrome is so achingly laborious and serious that it won’t be encroaching on either for virtual shelf space in the Toxic Masculinity section of anyone’s streaming library.

This seriousness takes some time to bed in, since it’s so serious, you don’t think it could possibly be that serious. Eisenberg plays Ralphie, a New York Uber driver who is dealing with a life change: his partner, Sal (Odessa Young), is pregnant, and the bills are getting harder and harder to pay, especially with Christmas approaching. A friend from the gym, Jason, tries to stage an intervention, introducing Ralphie to Dad Dan (Adrien Brody), the charismatic leader of an intense but welcoming all-male self-help group. Ralphie tries to resist his generous overtures, but Dad Dan finds his weak spot: “You have that look,” he says. “Like no one ever showed up for you.”

Meanwhile, his relationship with Sal is deteriorating, and a common motif is that Ralphie is often spiritually or emotionally absent when they’re together (“Where did you go, Ralphie?” asks Sal, more than once). With Dad Dan, however, it’s a different story, and when the latter tells Ralphie that he has “a cataclysmic power to create and annihilate…” Well, it’s game on. Suffering a kind of breakdown, Ralphie becomes another person, tapping into his destructive instincts—perhaps fuelled by steroids, an aspect of gym culture alluded to by bulk containers of protein powder—and finally descending into madness after Sal leaves him literally holding the baby.

Manodrome is so full of portent that, for quite some time, all there seems to be is endless portent, notably in a scene where a creepy street Santa appears to expose himself to Ralphie, a surreal WTF moment at odds with the so-far realist tone. But when Ralphie snaps, we’re suddenly in a whole other story: a first-person meltdown movie that brings to mind the much better (but just as dour) Sundance entry Magazine Dreams. Eisenberg can do dark, complex and conflicted, but outright deranged is perhaps a stop beyond his station, especially when the character’s vicious homophobia unexpectedly enters the frame. It’s also a place this film didn’t really need to go to, hammering home its rather obvious thoughts on male violence that, quite frankly, don’t really help anybody.

The film has relevance, of course, at a time when vulnerable men are groomed and politicized, but, curiously, Manodrome doesn’t investigate that at all, preferring instead to be an well-worn melodrama with a varnish of faux importance. Such is the fast turnover of culture wars that tomorrow’s headlines too often make yesterday’s movies.

Jeon Do-yeon who earned the Cannes best actress award for her part in Lee Chang-dong’s tragedy-ridden “Secret Sunshine” back in 2007 and has long had the reputation as Korea’s most-admired female actor, gets a chance to show her range in “Kill Boksoon.”

The Netflix-backed action film plays in the Berlinale Special section of the Berlin Film Festival and is a witty action showcase that was created especially for Jeon by one of Korea’s best young directors, Byun Sung-hyun.

What were your intentions when you set out to make Kill Boksoon?

Byun Sung-hyun: My previous work before this was a political film. And after filming that, I had no particular intention other than to create something with the amazing actress Jeon Do-yeon. I didn’t give her any kind of text or scripts. I just asked her if she’d do the next film together.

My focus was how to take advantage of this talented actress. Not only is she highly regarded, she’s also living this life as a mother. As I watched her, I created a story to reflect that dichotomy. She’s done a lot of films that are deep and meaningful. I wanted to forego any message conveying that and instead tell a story that she hadn’t done before. You could say that this film was completely and wholly conceived from her.

Was Jeon Do-yeon part of the screenwriting process?

Byun: Jeon did not write the narrative or storyline. I could write the lines of the killers, but there are lines that only a mother could say. Jeon would do improv and I would write down some of her lines.

Jeon: As an actor my work has all been open to the public. However, my private life is kept very private. Director Byun would come over to my home and observe me having conversations with my [one] daughter.

How do you see this role fitting into your career narrative?

Jeon: I became known to the general public through my film “Secret Sunshine” [for which she won the best actress award at Cannes in 2007] and after that was rather trapped within certain boundaries. Darker and deeper, more serious works kept coming my way. I wanted to break through that boundary, but there was nothing that I could do other than wait for the right piece. The character Boksoon is someone who shows everybody that was more to this actor.

That was a long wait.

Jeon: I’ve been ready for a long time. I think it was the directors that weren’t.

Can we maybe contextualize this. It is a female-led film. But is mother and killer a role model?

Byun: For a very long time action films have pertained to male characters only. And as time went on, I think the audience may have gotten rather tired of seeing that. It’s not necessarily that they wanted to see female characters play those roles. But I think it definitely led to an opportunity for the audience and the industry to widen their horizon in terms of how to look at characters.

Did you have to train a lot for the role?

Jeon: It may not all come across. But yes, I trained a lot.

Byun: Usually with action films you don’t use a lot of longer takes. That means you can use a lot of stunt doubles. However, when we did our storyboard, we were clear that there had to be long action sequences, where the actress herself had to be there, because we would focus on her face. She really had to get in there herself. A lot of scenes were very demanding and physically challenging.

Please explain the atmosphere and universe you sought to create. It is dark and violent, but it is treated with wit and humor.

Byun: I wanted to create a graphic novel-kind of mood. A part of it was because my previous film [“Kingmaker”] was so very grounded. I wanted something fictional, but not too fantastical.

I set out to do that from the very first scene where there is a fight on the bridge. This particular bridge is very well known to all Koreans. So to have these absurd things happening there sets the mood for the rest of the film.

The universe of companies who employ killers we’ve seen before in “John Wick,” which was definitely an influence. But I wanted to give it a little taste that is uniquely Korean. The killers in “John Wick,” they’re just so cool. [In “Kill Boksoon”] they’re more rugged, a little bit more like people that you would meet every day.

And as there are two stories – that of the killer and the mother – I had to maintain the adequate distance between Boksoon’s two worlds. If we presented the killer universe in a way that was over the top then it would take away from the reality of her life as a mother. And vice versa.

You seem to play a lot with verbal jokes, only some of which come across in translation.

Byun: Well, yes, the pun between Kill and the character’s name Gil [G and K are written and pronounced the same way in Korean] was definitely intended. Elsewhere, those scenes where the killers get together, or have dinner, I wanted the dialogue to be very nonchalant – “oh yes, I hear he was on a business trip last week and died” – something that you would just hear among regular office workers talking about their everyday lives and work. In ‘John Wick’ you’d hear talk of ‘taking someone out’ or discussion of their cash prizes.

In [“Kill Boksoon”] in those scenes where there is confrontation, the dialog is not grave or menacing. It’s just like, ‘you know, please understand I have to make ends meet’ and the other person’s ‘like, yeah, I get it.’

Using words like ‘show’ instead of ‘execution’ also plays into the deception the mother and killer is playing on her daughter.

Byun: Yes, definitely. Using works like ‘show’ and ‘script’ made it feel like you were walking into a top tier entertainment company or a film distributor and you’re meeting with the head of the company. I brought in a lot of film industry jargon, such as when the characters tell each other that they should have their phones turned off when shooting a scene. Another phrase is the ‘Good work’ phrase that is widely used on a Korean film set.

And where is the Korean entertainment industry headed?

Byun: Korean content is being loved globally. And there is certainly a lot of great content in Korea. But my personal taste admiration and respect is more for the content created in the early 2000s. That’s actually what I aspire to achieve. I also think that as time goes by there is going to be greater demand and higher bar set for the quality of the content that comes out of Korea.

Jeon: After I shot ‘Secret Sunshine,’ I actually got a call asking if I wanted to audition for the next ‘Terminator.’ That’s not the most expected call that you would get after doing a film like [heart-wrenching art-house title] “Secret Sunshine.” But I have to say it’s really not easy because of the language barrier. As an actor, I place utmost importance on what language I use, what kind of dialogue I use as this character. I don’t think I’ll be going into global projects any time soon.

So, no Hollywood agent then?

Jeon: That’s correct!

Hours before their Sundance premieres, we spoke with the writing fellows of Women Write Now, Hartbeat’s annual comedic screenwriting fellowship for Black women in partnership with the Sundance Institute. 

In addition to hearing from the writing fellows Danielle Solomon, Mayanna Berrin, and Kiana Butler, we were joined by Hartbeat’s Head of Film, Candice Wilson-Cherry, who takes us through how the program is designed to directly address the lack of BIPOC women in leadership positions like showrunners and in writers’ rooms; and actor Logan Browning (The Perfection, Dear White People) who discussed her directorial debut working on the short Hey Boo, alongside the two other directing fellows, Tika Sumpter and Nicole Byer.

In this episode, we discuss…

• How the Women Write Now program is filling a void in the writing space 

• Their process for finding writers and directors for the program

• The development process of each of the shorts 

• Fitting the script into only 10 pages

• Having to adjust things for the budgets

• Finding mentors who would guide fellows in nurturing yet realistic ways

• Doing table reads versus chemistry reads

• Letting go of control by trusting actors

• Hitting deadlines so you don’t hold up production

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