This is a big winter for Joe Swanberg, our 2009 readers’ choice for best local filmmaker.
Swanberg, who specializes in naturalistic, sexually frank, technologically savvy portraits of young-adult relationships, has three new features premiering, one this week at the Sundance Film Festival and on VOD, and two more next month at the equally prestigious Berlin Film Festival.
Uncle Kent stars cowriter Kent Osborne, a writer and voice actor for Spongebob Squarepants, as an LA cartoonist who meets a woman on Chatroulette and invites her to crash with him, where he can pine for her at close range. It opens this Friday 1/21 in Sundance’s Spotlight section and through IFC’s Festival Direct VOD label. Three of its six screenings at the festival are already sold out.
Inspired by Chekhov’s The Seagull, Silver Bullets is about an actress who spurns her auteur boyfriend to act in a werewolf movie. Art History offers another cinematic love triangle, as a filmmaker’s jealousy over the developing relationship between his stars leads him to sabotage his own graphic production. The two films play together in the 41st Berlinale, 2/10-2/20.