Crestone (2020)
Director: Marnie Ellen Hertzler Run Time: 73 min. Rating: NR Release Year: 2021
Starring: Benz Rowm, Champloo Sloppy, Huckleberry, Keem, Mijo Mehico, RyBundy
Country: United States
Language: English
Presented in the Virtual Screening Room in partnership with Circle Collective.
“Reminds its audience that humans are together in our desperate and possibly lifelong search for identity, even if some of us go to the end of the earth, or Crestone, Colorado, to find it.”
– Fiona Murphy, Vox Magazine
About the film:
Official Selection of the 2020 True/False Film Festival and SXSW Film Festival.
In a world that undulates between fact and fiction, digital and physical, a group of SoundCloud rappers lives a solitary, post-societal existence in the desert town of Crestone, Colorado. Once a religious and spiritual mecca for many, Crestone’s endless sand dunes, waterfalls, and dark caves act as a backdrop for images of tattooed bodies, cosplay wardrobes, and clouds of weed smoke.
Crestone explores the often hidden aspects of collaboration and friendship as well as the human desire to persist against all odds. What does music sound like if there is no one left to repost and share it?
About the filmmaker:
A unique voice in the cinematic landscape, Marnie Ellen Hertzler has crafted experimental short films combining video art, animation and memoir to explore interpersonal relationships and technology. She was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 2018 25 New Faces of Independent Film and was a 2019 IFP Narrative Lab fellow.
Her 2017 short Growing Girl, a multi-media exploration of female empowerment, was part of the 2019 MoMA Future of Film Is Female Program. In her 2018 short film Hi I Need to be Loved, actors from Craigslist auditioned for a film with dramatic readings of spam emails while Hertzler controlled the speed of the teleprompter. The short premiered at the 71st Locarno Festival before screening at festivals around the world. Featured on the Criterion Channel in 2020, Dirt Daughter was called “impossible-to-pin-down” by Penelope Bartlett with Criterion.
In her first feature film, Crestone, Hertzler continues to diverge from traditional storytelling in highlighting the unconventional lifestyle of friends from high school. “I know them so well, they are the fringe, and they live a lifestyle that is sometimes frowned upon…And it’s beautiful. So I wanted to show that.” Read more in IndieWire or listen to Hertzler describe her filmmaking process in an interview by Eric Lavallée with Ioncinema.
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