Chlorophyl2011

Award-winning filmmaker Barry Jenkins returned to his hometown of Miami for this mood-drenched look at love and alienation, created for the city’s Borscht Film Festival. Adrift in the gleaming white void of a new apartment, a young woman talks to an absent lover on the phone; later, she attends a photo shoot and then drives alone through an empty city to a teeming nightclub. She ultimately sees something she’d rather not. It’s not the plot that matters but how Jenkins frames it within urban space, shooting Miami with the same kind of detail and affection he showed San Francisco in his earlier hit, MEDICINE FOR MELANCHOLY. That film’s romantic aura is here changed to a far lonelier sense of displacement (however echoed in the soulless new constructions the heroine finds herself in). "The city featured in the movie has existed for only five years," noted Andrew Hevia, the film’s producer. "It’s a Miami that didn’t exist when Barry last lived here." - Jason Sanders