APART FROM THAT (garbage out there)

Just a few weeks ago the new release of Apart From That landed in my mailbox and what a nice surprise it was.

In this, the first foray from film-makers Jennifer Shainin and Randy Walker into the land of feature film-making I found them premiering their film, one that would spark the memory of why I fell in love with the movies to begin with, in Austin, Texas at SXSW in 2006. After 4 or 5 ho-hum days at the festival here was this film that, literally immediately after viewing, I ran back to my hotel room to email Shainin and Walker, hoping they would be kind enough to accept an invite to the Jacksonville Film Festival. Imagine my surprise when without the hemming and hawing which I, as a programmer of a no-name festival, have grown quite accustomed to they accepted and, in fact, seemed truly excited by the invite. From Jacksonville it went on to screen at SIFF, Cinevegas, Edinburgh, was included in a series curated by Ray Carney at Harvard, a part of Indiewire's Undiscovered Gems series and hosted at a slew of other festivals. Still, in 2007 Apart From That finds itself with no distribution deal.

It is these circumstances that surround my surprise and delight with this dvd. Shainin and Walker didn't just allow their film to receive some lazy release: they provided the dvd with special extras such as interviews with Kathleen Mcnearney(Ulla) and Tony Cladoosby(Leo), footage from 5 different auditions which consisted of improvisations based on cold readings, 40 moments behind-the-scenes, trailers for films they dig, the soundtrack to the film and on top of all this the dvd is hugged by a 8 1/2 by 6 80-page hard bound book full of color stills and notes from the film. Truly it looks more like an issue of McSweeney’s than a dvd of a film that was faced with what can only be described as total indifference from theatrical distributors.

Consisting of overlapping and parallel narrative threads that all are playful, courageous and thoughtful there is one scene, in particular, that seems to speak to how the film may be received and possibly why audiences didn't come knockin'. Ulla, a beauty school student, is being roped in to a role playing session for an upcoming intervention with her colleagues worried about the alleged drunkard in their social circle, to be portrayed in this roleplay by the awkward Ulla. At first, Ulla attempts to follow what she hopes are the rules of this invented intervention but ultimately breaks into an incredibly powerful performance that takes her colleagues by surprise and shock, maybe even a wee bit frightened by the emotion that Ulla unleashes upon them. At one point the intensity is so strong the leader of the intervention calls out "Ulla" as if to stop her from going too far. Once Ulla's performance has ended and she exits the room the others are stunned and not quite sure what they have just witnessed. Their idea of role playing has just been completely smashed by Ulla's enthusiasm for the exercise. This may be overstating it but I feel that most audiences react to APART FROM THAT the same way these colleagues of Ulla's reacted to her sense of play in that scene: organized and performed in a way that is unfamiliar to them, becoming an uncomfortable experience because of the choice to hold on to the way they think a film should "act".

I am not saying that everyone would love the film if new rules were handed out at the entrance to the cinema but I do believe that there is a larger audience for the film if perhaps, audiences were not so trained by the fodder that currently is clogging up festivals and the multiplexes (here I may be overstating again). I for one am thrilled that Jennifer and Randy didn't just abandon their project, after no distribution deal was struck, but created a beautiful artifact for those to enjoy and discover, in the comforts of their homes, the brilliance that is APART FROM THAT.

Buy it Here
www.foreignamericanpictures.com