Coming to NYC’s Stranger Than Fiction as its winter season closing film tomorrow, Tuesday, February 26: AN OVERSIMPLIFICATION OF HER BEAUTY
Terence Nance’s audacious exploration of the fine line between friend and lover had its world premiere last year at Sundance. Its extensive festival circuit has included, among others, Rotterdam, San Francisco, New Directors/New Films, Urbanworld, Sundance London, Cleveland, Traverse City, Montclair, and New Orleans.
Nance’s debut had its origins as a documentary project but ends up as something that’s neither fiction nor non-fiction. Remarkably personal and universal at once, the film is a record of a young man’s growing, but seemingly unrequited, love for his close woman friend. Laying his heart bare, Nance wildly blends verité footage of conversations with the object of his (or his character’s) desire, the charming Namik, with introspective voice over, various animation techniques, re-enactments, confessional interviews, and music to approximate what it means to be head over heels infatuated with someone just out of reach. It’s a daring, original, and deeply satisfying approach to storytelling – its blurring of documentary and narrative mirroring the obsessive close reading – and rewriting – of reality we all engage in when we’re completely crushed out.
Note: Director Nance will be in attendance for a post-screening Q&A.
what (not) to doc 