Artsploitation Films is pleased to announce a NY theatrical release date double-header for VANISHING WAVES and CLIP. Both films will debut at the Cinema Village in New York on March 15, 2013 with more cities to follow.
VANISHING WAVES swept all the major awards – Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Actress (Jurga Jutaite) – at 2012’s Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas. It also won Best Film at the Rio Grind Film Festival in Vancouver where it was described by the festival director Rachel Fox as “the most acclaimed film – by a female filmmaker, or anyone period, of 2012.” VANISHING WAVES also played at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, Palic European Film Festival, Neuchatel International Fantastic Film Festival and Sitges Film Festival.
VANISHING WAVES is a bold, visionary work of science fiction cinema that recalls the genre in its cerebral 1960s and ’70s golden age, just as it simultaneously forges new territory with its unique fusion of emotional melodrama and hallucinatory widescreen spectacle,VANISHING WAVES is one of the most accomplished and distinctive European films in recent memory. The second solo feature from Lithuanian director Kristina Buozyte, following her acclaimed 2008 debut The Collectress, the 2012 production VANISHING WAVES confirms Buozyte as a major young talent whose frequently breathtaking visual and technical gifts are thankfully also matched by her interest in complex characterizations, adventurous narratives, and challenging themes.
Her new film is a science fiction romance that is equally occupied by the erotic as well as the fantastic. Lukas (Marius Jampolskis) is assisting a scientific research team by functioning as a patient in a series of heavily monitored (and medicated) sensory deprivation experiments wherein he is attempting to make some form of contact with the subject, Aurora (Jurga Jutaite), a young woman who has been locked in a comatose state for some time. Doctors initially hope for just a vague reaffirmation of consciousness, but the experiment takes an unexpected twist when Lukas and Aurora actually develop a strong psychic link in their mutually altered forms of consciousness…and their link quickly evolves into a romantic, sexually charged relationship. As Lukas hides this data from his researchers, he and Aurora meet secretly and passionately in a series of surreal dreamscapes created by their collective minds, but their union is tragically doomed to collapse around them. Exploring the tantalizing possibilities of forming a true, all-encompassing bond with one’s lover, VANISHING WAVES is hypnotic, erotic, wholly engrossing, and wildly thought-provoking cinema that transcends any perceived limitations of the science fiction genre, becoming one of the year’s most provocative films in the process.
CLIP is a dynamic, disturbing portrait of contemporary Serbian youth. Jasna, played fearlessly by Isidora Simijonovic, is a pretty girl in her mid-teens. With a terminally ill father and dispirited mother at home, she is disillusioned by her unglamorous life in a dismal Belgrade suburb. Opposing everyone, including herself, she goes experimenting with sex, drugs and partying.
CLIP director Maja Miloš was born in Belgrade, Serbia, in 1983 and graduated in Film Directing at the University of Arts in Belgrade in 2008. She directed 11 short films during her studies, including INTERVAL and SI TU TIMAZIN. Her first feature-length film CLIP had its world premiere at the Rotterdam International Film Festival last year. In CLIP, Jasna, a teenage Serbian girl, grapples with random sexual encounters and an uncertain future. With her father plagued by illness, Jasna is left with nothing to help her navigate her world other than her camera phone and a strong desire to capture clips of her life speeding by. Writer/Director Maja Miloš makes her directorial debut in this searing portrait of modern Serbia. With her young and courageous cast, Miloš crafts an uncensored, sexually frank and ferociously honest portrait of modern youth. As Jasna rushes to leave her adolescence behind, she takes on a life of aimless wandering that appears lonely and precarious, but somehow she maintains control of this wild ride. This stunning first film won the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s International Film Festival of Rotterdam. It won Best Director honors for Miloš at the Transylvania International Film Festival. It won the White Iris Award at the Brussels European Film Festival and the Kingfisher Award at the Ljubljana International Film Festival. It also played the Toronto International Film Festival, Montreal’s Festival du Noveau Cinema, The Chicago International Film Festival and AFI Fest in Los Angeles respectively. A close collaboration between Miloš and her precocious ingénue, Isadora Simijonovic, CLIP is a raw, unflinching look at the perilous world of a rootless teenager in the line of Larry Clark’s KIDS, a film centered on the daily lives of a group of sexually active teenagers in the mid-90s New York City.
VANISHING WAVES and CLIP open in New York on Friday, March 15 at:
Cinema Village
22 East 12th Street, New York, CA 10003
Box Office: (212) 924-3363