STRAIGHT CIRCLE After Dark

North American Premiere

Oscar Hudson’s debut feature is a surrealist anti-war parable about two soldiers stationed at a fictional desert border. A chain-link fence bisects the vast, featureless expanse. Standing guard on either side, the soldiers protect their respective homelands and preserve the fragile peace between nations. Real-life twins Elliott and Luke Tittensor, best known for their work in HOUSE OF THE DRAGON, play the border guards of the opposing armies. One is clean-shaven and wears a dazzling white uniform in accord with the customs of his country; the other is bearded and in military khakis. However, without distinguishing features on either side of the fence, the guards’ separate domains eventually become muddled, and so too do their identities. Isolated, low on provisions and subjected to the scorching desert sun day in and day out, boundaries of space and self dissolve. Hudson employs split-screen techniques to clever, disorienting, even dizzying effect as the film tilts further and further into the uncanny. Winner of the IWONDERFULL Grand Prize and the Verona Film Club Award for Most Innovative Film at this year’s Venice Critics’ Week, STRAIGHT CIRCLE is a hallucinatory, black-comedy satire that heralds the emergence of a formidable new cinematic talent and showcases the incredible range of its two lead performers. –Travis Weedon