Refocus Film Festival kicked off on Thursday, October 9th, with a showing at the Englert of Train Dreams from director Clint Bentley, followed by a Q&A with actor Will Patton (who narrates the film) and Cindy Lee Johnson (widow of Denis Johnson, author of the book by the same title). What is Refocus you might ask? Refocus is FilmScene Nonprofit Cinema’s annual celebration of adaptation in the form of a film festival. Beyond just films, it includes a wide variety of events and activities for the community.
My own 2025 Refocus experience kicked off with a live recording of the podcast Filmspotting hosted by Adam Kempenaar and Michael Phillips, in which they discussed the best film adaptations of books by Iowan writers. Following the format of the podcast, they both counted down their top five picks. It was an invigorating experience for me, because I had only seen one of the ten films they discussed, which was Field of Dreams (based on the book by W. P. Kinsella). However, other films included in their top 5s had been in my watchlist for a while, such as the two Paul Newman-starring adaptations of Walter Tevis books, The Hustler and The Color of Money. Kempenaar’s #1 film has also been in my watchlist for some time, which is The World According to Garp (based on the book by John Irving, who made an appearance at a previous Refocus).
My first actual film of Refocus 2025 was at 9:15pm that Friday with Fucktoys from director Annapurna Sriram. The film also stars Sriram as a young woman who discovers that she’s had a curse set upon her. She goes from job to job, attempting to raise the funds necessary to break the curse. Fucktoys is a wild ride of eyecandy visuals and tonal shifts and the film is impressively intentional with the former and pulls off most of the latter (mostly). It’s at its best when it’s a buddy movie about Sriram and her co-star, Sadie Scott. The film will undoubtedly resonate deeply with a very specific audience (excluding one moment at the end which will go unmentioned). However, it’s difficult to get truly wrapped up in the characters, possibly because Sriram worked for eight years as writer, director, and star of the film Not unlike Sorry, Baby, or Smashing Machine, from earlier this year, Fucktoys might’ve felt a little more effortless if Sriram had a more distance from it, but then again, it might not have been nearly as endearing that way.
My second film of the weekend was the next morning, with Peter Hujar’s Day. Peter Hujar’s Day is the latest film from director and writer Ira Sachs, and even though it clocks in at only 76 minutes (including credits) and is basically just about two people talking in a room, it feels like one of the most epic films of the year. It is also one of the best. The film is based on a real interview between writer Linda Rosenkrantz (played in the film by Rebecca Hall) and photographer Peter Hujar (Ben Whishaw) in New York, 1974. At this time, Rosenkrantz was considering writing a book filled with descriptions of people’s days. The film is her interview with Hujar. Rosenkrantz’s book went unrealized for decades until 2022 when she turned the interview with Hujar into a book. Ira Sachs resists the urge to cut away to the actual events that Hujar describes and the result is a series of oddly transfixing vignettes. Hall and Whishaw give two of the best performances of the year in the sense that they feel like they really have been friends for years (the fact that the two actors actually have been undoubtedly helps this, but their syncretism of that and dedication to character is impressive). Sachs and cinematographer Alex Ashe are able to evoke extremely on-point feelings of tiredness and the film becomes a gorgeous portrait of what it’s like to be an artist.
Later that Saturday, I finally caught up with everybody else and saw Train Dreams which was followed by the same Q&A with Patton and Johnson. Train Dreams is entirely serviceable and appropriately weird. The latter is especially evoked by the odd visual look of the film, including the low shutter speed, giving the film a dreamlike quality. The first half or so feels perhaps intentionally aimless, but this is amended after the midway point and the film really kicks into what it’s meant to be: a ghost story. There’s a haunted quality throughout the film that really shines during the dream sequences. The finished film might feel more memorable if director Clint Bentley allowed these sequences to bleed into reality a little more, but he was perhaps tempted by an understandable urge to keep the film grounded. Unlike Bentley’s last credit (as a writer for 2023 film, Sing Sing), in which Colman Domingo’s showy Oscar-worthy performance clashes with the rest of the cast of entirely real prisoners, the performances in Train Dreams are well-calibrated. Joel Edgerton gives a consistent performance throughout, despite having to “age” multiple decades, and Felicity Jones (despite not getting a lot to do) is giving a similarly effective performance as she gave last year in The Brutalist. Train Dreams might not be as memorable as some (especially those who are fans of Johnson’s novel) would like, but that doesn’t make it unimpressive.
My second-to-last movie on Saturday was the new film from legendary South Korean director, Park Chan-wook, No Other Choice. Despite having almost no prior experience with Chan-wook’s work, I found myself quite excited for this one. Just based on what I knew about his sensibilities, I’ve always sort of assumed that I’d fall right in love with his filmography. Turns out I was right. Park Chan-wook’s remake of the Costa-Garvas film (called The Ax) is about a man named Man-soo (Lee Byung-hun) who’s let go from his job and comes to the conclusion that the only way to get hired to a good position again is to get rid of the competition. That is to say, murder them. This is far from a John Wick-esque revenge movie, though. No, the murder “spree” in No Other Choice is messy and darkly comedic. They are vastly different films, but I couldn’t help but think of PTA’s One Battle After Another from earlier this year as a comparison. Both films shift effortlessly from tone to tone, the action shifts from exhilarating to unsettling, and even though No Other Choice is one of the more upsetting films made this year, it’s also one of the funniest. It had the audience in the palm of its hand and by the end I wondered if I’d heard that many laughs in a theater since The Naked Gun.
Speaking of unsettling, my final film of Saturday was an older film (which means it wasn’t up for Refocus’s Audience Choice award): 1998’s Love & Pop, directed by Manga-veteran Hideaki Anno. Going into a movie blind 100% has its benefits. Not knowing at all where No Other Choice was going was such a thrilling experience and I highly recommend going in as blind as you can. However, Love & Pop might not fall into that same category. Based on the title and poster, I was prepping myself for a fun time. Instead, what I witnessed is one of the most quietly disturbing films I’ve ever seen. Don’t get me wrong, the film is arguably a masterpiece, but it definitely took a moment for my brain to calibrate properly. Watching Love & Pop, a film about teenage girls in Tokyo who decide to become call girls, I continuously felt as though I shouldn’t be witnessing what I was watching. Much like Blair Witch Project (a “found footage” movie), 28 Days Later (about people living after the fall of civilization), and David Lynch’s Inland Empire (about a mentally ill person’s dreams, probably), this movie is intentionally shot on low-quality digital cameras capturing something extremely personal, and it’s not something we’re used to being exposed to in film. Love & Pop might not be a film I’m eager to rewatch anytime soon, but it is undeniably a feat of digital cinematography.
I started my Sunday with the animated film Little Amélie or the Character of Rain directed by Mailys Vallade and Liane-Cho Han. Thanks to the efforts of FilmScene’s education director Jarrod DeRooi, City High’s French students (the characters in the film are from Belgium and speak French) were invited for free to this screening which was actually the North American premiere of the film. The film is about a Belgian family living in Japan just after the second world war. The titular protagonist (Loïse Charpentier) starts her life as a vegetable, thinking she’s God, but soon grows into a person and becomes infatuated with their house’s caretaker, Nishio-San (Victoria Grobois). Little Amélie is beautifully animated and it’s got a talented voice cast, but I found myself not as in love with the film as some of my peers were. The narration from the titular character is more effective than most first-person narration I’ve seen, but the last act of the film feels weirdly manipulative. It’s not atrocious, but by the end of the film, I couldn’t help but feel like the directors were telling me how to feel. Manipulation is obviously an inherent part of the art form, but this just felt a little lazy. As opposed to something like My Neighbor Totoro (a fair comparison, both films are from the perspective of a little girl, or little girls), the tear-jerking moments in Little Amélie are a little too calculated. Despite the beautiful animation, it feels a little more in line with some of Pixar’s recent attempts such as Inside Out 2 or Elio. All this being said, Little Amélie is still mostly unlike the majority of animated films from the last decade and that’s gotta be worth something.
My second-to-last movie of the festival was at 4:00 on Sunday with Lucile Hadžihalilović’s The Ice Tower,another film in French. The Ice Tower wasn’t the best film at Refocus this year, but it very well may have been the vibiest. Hadžihalilović creates such a lush world that evoked in me the feeling of being read a spooky fairy tale. Its protagonist is a young girl named Jeanne (Clara Pacini, in her debut film) who runs away from home and lives in a movie studio where she witnesses the making of a film based on the fairy tale The Snow Queen– the titular queen being a famous actress named Christana (Marion Cotillard). Jeanne finagles her way into becoming an extra for the movie and things become more and more abstract. Jeanne’s fascination for Christina grows and Christina starts to become obsessed with the young Jeanne as well. The Ice Tower is nearly two hours long, and you can feel it, but to be clear, this is complimentary. The film’s pace isn’t what anyone would call propulsive– that doesn’t matter. I would’ve been happy to sit in the theater for another hour. The term “style over substance” gets thrown around a lot in film criticism (too much, if you ask me), but at the end of the day, if the film sticks with you, then why can’t the style become the substance? I’ve never encountered Hadžihalilović’s work before, yet it’s clear based on this film that she’s a master of turning style to substance. I have a feeling I’ll be returning to The Ice Tower soon.
Which brings us to the last film of the night, Nia DaCosta’s Hedda. DaCosta’s next film is 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, a direct sequel to Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later, so I was excited to see this film on the big screen instead of just on Prime Video at home (where it’ll be dumped on October 29). Hedda is based on Henrik Ibsen’s 1891 play, Hedda Gabler. It follows the titular character (Tessa Thompson) throughout the course of one night in which she’s throwing a party at her and her husband (Tom Bateman)’s house. However, things take a turn when Hedda’s former love, Eileen (Nina Hoss) shows up at the party. For the first two acts (it’s got a five act structure) I was impressed by how little I felt the weight of it being adapted from a play. Films based on plays can often feel uncinematic because at the end of the day, the two mediums are more different than most people might think. However, after the two act mark, I began to feel this weight a little more. The film becomes increasingly more talky and DaCosta (understandably) has trouble making the remaining three acts feel cinematic. This is also when the film takes a turn to the darker side, meaning it’s not quite as fun as the beginning, which doesn’t help matters much. As I said, though, this doesn’t apply to the first two acts, and those are the ones that reaffirm DaCosta as one of our more promising up-and-coming major directors.
I hope that throughout this article I’ve made it clear just how special Refocus is. Throughout the course of the festival, I was never any less excited about the next film because I knew that it would be something special, regardless of whether I loved it or not. So if you’re interested in film at all (I assume you are if you’ve made it to the end of this article), consider going to Refocus next year. Perhaps only for one or two films, instead of the eight that I tackled. Goodbye, Refocus. I’ll see you again in 12 months.
