COPA 71, Hundreds of Beavers, T Blockers, Spermworld and Close to You are ready for your watchlists this month.
Congratulations on surviving the 2023–2024 awards season! Your reward is the news that our correspondents just snagged Four Faves from the likes of Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt at SXSW—now it’s time to highlight some of the more underground pictures that aren’t necessarily afforded the privilege of an A-list press tour. For the new initiates of our monthly Watchlist This! column, here’s the gist: we comb through Letterboxd reviews and festivals to boost our favorite bubbling-under films that deserve a fighting chance to make it to your watchlists.
Some of these indie works are now playing in select cinemas, some are readily available to stream and some are still vying for a shot at proper distribution. For March, we’re offering a smattering of powerful trans stories (from tender coming-of-age to neon-drenched horror), the latest non-fiction outing from the recent Independent Spirit best editing award-winner, a live-action cartoon about battling a legion of semiaquatic rodents, and a kick-ass soccer documentary detailing the defiant events of the 1971 Women’s World Cup.
This month’s picks come from Gemma Gracewood, Ella Kemp, Jack Moulton and Katie Rife. Enjoy.
Directed by Dominic Savage, written by Savage and Elliot Page.European Premiere in London on March 14 at BFI Flare; US theatrical date TBC.Pageboy Productions
“Small towns! A homecoming! Growing up! Becoming more of you. I liked it, my heart seems to burst,” writes gcb_ of the Elliot Page-led Close to You. It’s perhaps one of this year’s most immediate and sensitive adult coming-of-agers, a specific subgenre of finding yourself once more in another chapter of your life—once adulthood has already taken its toll a little bit.
Page plays Sam, a young man returning home for the first major family event since transitioning. He runs into old friend Katherine (Hillary Baack) on the way to reconnect, reminisce and look forward to new ways to recognize each other. “Hillary and I have known each other for over ten years,” Page told us in Toronto last September at the film’s world premiere at TIFF.
He adds: “We had that inherent connection immediately, so that foundation is there, stepping into doing this. Working with someone as extraordinarily talented as [Hillary], as organic and natural, and so deeply present, reactions I would have as Sam in these scenes were unexpected. So intense. It was quite a remarkable experience to feel those twists and turns.”
Letterboxd members have shared their love for Page’s vision, co-written with director Dominic Savage. “I can’t claim to know the specificity of the trans masculine experience of Sam, and yet so much of this spoke directly to me,” writes Kylie on Letterboxd. “To be the queer child in a family that does not want a queer child, but that wants family to remain family. To be passive aggressively polite. To take any attempt at honesty as an attack on the family. I’ve never seen my family and the pain of being in it, of feeling other and yet—mostly—wanting to connect, in art quite like this before.”
Page is thrilled with the response and grateful for the connection. “All you can hope is that it touches people. So much of the film is about connection and feeling seen,” he says. “I can only hope people walk away feeling that way themselves.” With a European premiere at London’s BFI Flare festival and a global wide release on the horizon, there are only more connections to come. EK
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Directed by Lance Oppenheim, written by Oppenheim and co-editor Daniel Garber.Premiering on FX on Friday, March 29; streaming on Hulu from March 20.FX/The New York Times
“The New York Times and FX let us make a documentary and call it Spermworld; I feel like a winner already,” writes co-editor and co-writer Daniel Garber in a cheerfully subjective Letterboxd review of his new documentary (gently ignoring that Spermworld reactions are embargoed at the time of publishing). Made with Lance Oppenheim, also a Letterboxd member, this is a heck of a team: Garber won the Film Independent Spirit Award this year for cutting How to Blow Up a Pipeline, and Oppenheim helmed the highly rated Florida retirement doc Some Kind of Heaven (fans are still waiting for that film’s amateur actress and horror fanatic Barbara Stanton to make her big-screen genre debut).
The title tells the story: Spermworld is a good-looking, often funny and wholly unnerving road-trip traversing the tumultuous process of trying to conceive with a stranger. With uncannily intimate access (are these people real?!), we travel with several American men who regularly donate sperm outside of the regulated fertility system. We meet some of their partners, some of the women they donate for, and learn some of the reasons they do it (to help build America’s workforce, to pass on their artistic abilities, because of a weird breeding kink, because it makes them feel wanted, and so on). We don’t learn a lot about the economic and systemic forces that drive people to make families this way, but we do meet many of the children, which drives home the reason for all of the risks and consequences these folks endure. GG