PREMIERE

Reviews out of FANTASTIC FEST

FANTASTIC FEST

BRIEF SUMMARY

A young artist loses herself in an unpredictable alter ego while attempting to cope with past trauma in this gripping sophomore effort from the creator of TOAD ROAD.

FULL DESCRIPTION

Amy is coming unglued. A young woman working a nothing job to finance her artistic endeavors, she has been plagued by nightmares for god knows how long; vivid and horrible things that plunge her into past trauma. Her only outlet is the increasingly outrageous artistic project and alter egos that may very well isolate Amy from her few remaining friends, but at least they also provide some distance from the pain. Then Amy meets Kenny, who’s kind and gentle and understanding, and for a moment, it appears as though life could get better.

A gifted cinematographer who has shot for Jonathan Caouette and Adrian Grenier, Jason Banker burst onto the director scene in 2012 with his debut feature TOAD ROAD. It was immediately obvious that Banker was a unique voice. Heavily employing documentary and improvisational techniques, Banker’s work defies easy categorization on many levels, resisting easy genre and style labels. In another time, he may have been tempted to sign on with the Dogme 95 crew by Banker’s work is more cinematic than Von Trier’s protest movement, with which it shares an emphasis on capturing the truth and essence of the characters and story.

With FELT, Banker proves that TOAD ROAD was no fluke. Banker maintains his fluid balance between intensely uncomfortable intimacy and cinematic flourish, drawing startlingly raw and vulnerable performances from Amy Everson—with whom he developed the story—and Kentucker Audley. We’re witnessing the emergence of a major talent here, and while it’s hard to say where his road will lead him, it’s going to be a fascinating journey. (Todd Brown)

Ain’t It Cool News / Harry Knowles

Harry @ Day 3 FANTASTIC FEST 2014: Some MONDOCON, FELT, EVERLY, SPRING & LOCAL GOD!

Now, yesterday this pair of really  snappily dressed folks approached me – and we took a photo – as we parted they gave me a business card for IFeltYourPenis.Com (FYI that link is very very NSFW btw) This girl Amy that I was meeting makes custom Felt Penises based upon YOUR Penis – and I have to admit, I then assumed this movie would be a documentary about her PENIS Felting empire – and…  ya know, I thought that was kinda fucking amazing.  We live in a world where you can have your penis reproduced in felt form.

That said… that wasn’t at all what the movie was.  First – it isn’t a documentary, it is an amazing narrative film where Amy Everson (the penis felter) acts for her first time in a movie by Jason Banker.  He directed the film TOAD ROAD, which was pretty damn good.  The film was being introduced by Todd Brown, which is always a great sign.  He was declaring this film one of the great surprises for him this year.  He absolutely wasn’t tracking the film.   This was a shoestring production, but don’t let that fool you – this is one of the very best and most involving films I’ve seen this year.

First off, the very shy seeming Amy Everson creates a stunning portrait of a woman at odds with the life she’s living.  Something tragic has occurred to her, but we don’t know exactly what that was.   She’s got girlfriends that worry about her, but really… she’s in her own head space.   She’s an artist, working out the weight on her soul by making costumes and other objects… yes, like a felt penis, but there’s more things of felt than penises here.  There’s a classic little scene where she’s taken Kentucker Audley to her place for the first time and is showing him her life.  She’s painted the ceiling sky blue, so it’s always a beautiful sky in her room.   One of the first creations she showed off was… so fricken funny!

What makes this film so impactful is watching Amy Everson’s character seemingly bloom while courting Kentucker’s character!  Now – this is a FANTASTIC FEST film.  Shit is going to hit a fan at some point.  The film was emotionally involved, had a wonderful sense of humor and tragedy.   I believed this romantic suspense flick.  The characters had souls you could feel from the movie.  This is a woman dealing with trauma in an artistic manner and you just feel incredibly protective of her over the course of the movie.

There’s really two incredibly important things to take from this film.   First, Jason Banker employed some Altman-esque Improv and Documentary coverage, which completely enthralled me.   Jason Banker is absolutely a major talent.   I haven’t seen a film this beautifully tragic since MAY by Lucky McKee.   They’re very different films, but about how the isolated so desperately want to believe in love, they yearn for it, but it so rarely comes to be.

The other is Amy Everson.  She’s definitely got a quirky streak, but oh my god you’ll love her in this movie.  Not just that, but I have been haunted & delighted by her performance for the rest of the day.  My feelings about both of the films I saw after this… well, you see a film that bares a soul like this, you really want everyone else to get their shit together and tell HUMAN STORIES with this blessed medium instead of…  well, I’ll get there.   I’d love to see Amy Everson to start showing up in Indies and possibly bigger films.   She’s for real!

TwitchFilm / Ben Umstead

Fantastic Fest 2014 Review: FELT, Healing Through Art Gets Extremely Human

There comes a moment early in Toad Road director Jason Banker’s Felt which beautifully sets the tone for what is to unfold over the next 70 or so minutes of his second narrative feature: After partying with a few young men in their hotel room, best pals Amy (Amy Everson) and Allana (Allana Reynolds) retreat to the hallway as Amy’s unclear on why she even came. She’s sick. She can’t sleep. Her dreams and reality are one and the same. As she says it: she is a ghost. She’s tried everything. Nothing helps. The two young women hold each other, laughing over the ways in which they could kill men, for a killing spree is perhaps the only thing Amy hasn’t tried to relieve her pain. Allana dreams of strangling a man with her thighs. Amy fantasizes about putting a needle right into the urethra of a penis. Lit by the strange warmth of a bleeding-red hall light, the friends dream together, waking. 

The moment is utterly human and humorous; an intimate moment between knowing friends, striking great clues to an inner pain that we in the audience are only just now starting to understand.

Director Banker started off in the world of documentary, notably with the Slamdance selected feature I Am Faith, which powerfully chronicled a camp for children dealing with early trauma that often outwardly manifested in violence towards others. Amy, in some ways, could be viewed as one of these children who never had the family support or the chance to heal within a community. Amy in that sense had to get creative. Literally. Dealing with the ghosts of her own rape and assault (a trauma we never know about in detail but live with all the same) Amy makes body suites with female and male genitalia, as well as felt penises. She wears the penis-equipped body suit under her clothes: in the woods, at parties, in bed… at a cemetery where she hides behind a stocking mask  she’s crudely painted with the face of what is to be assumed is her rapist. 

Through the hazy Northern California days Amy wanders, she dances, she hides, a woodland spirit shot by an arrow, now wielding that arrow with no target. Her friends set up dates for her to no avail. It is on one fortuitous night that she meets the quietly humorous, gentle-eyed Kenny (Kentucker Audley) that things change for her. Evocatively dancing in front of him in her chicken suit, Kenny baffled as to who this actually is, we know she falls in love perhaps too quickly. Only in the soft embrace of that new love do old scars and secrets go unrevealed, the couple loosing ground and losing trust quite quickly. 

Banker’s naturalistic, improv heavy approach to narrative is sure to be a decisive deal breaker for some audience members, as the film can, at times, meander to paralyzing effect. A film once feeling vibrant with vulnerability and verve, Felt can feel numbed, muted, losing ground for our empathy towards Amy, rather than emphasizing her own mood shifts. But these moments are brief, never fully derailing, merely coming with the loose, find-the-moment nature territory of the piece. As it goes Banker is too sensitive of a director to really lose us, and Amy is far to striking a persona on her own merits to not warrant our attention. What the creative pair ultimately gives us is a non-judgmental, shame free look into a story ripe with judgments and shame. There are no easy answers in Felt, though it may be easy to dismiss Amy’s eccentric, often maddening behavior. With that Banker is asking us to be careful, because by doing so we accept the notion that we live in a culture that largely dismisses rape and violence towards women. And accepting that isn’t the key. It is dismissal in all its ugliness. 

What is paramount is accepting a woman as a person, not as an object of violence and victim of violence. Feeling for the woman who dances on a log, wrapped in stockings and cloth, waving a plastic penis from her groin… Accepting her helps heal.

By this turn, Banker has found and accepted Amy Everson, in all her so-called eccentricities, to beautiful affect. While some could shrug Felt off as horror ala Miranda July (which to me sounds awesome, by the way), it’s again too open of a movie to pigeonholed. What Felt really acts as is a united front of creative forces on a conversation for a subject in our society that needs to get much, much louder. To do this, an artist allows another artist into what is by and large her creative life, and that’s very real. To watch that kind of collaboration unfold on screen often results in pure joy, which is siphoned and given to us in that great sadness of knowing and unknowing, the same which Amy dances through with her felt penises.
 
Banker as a filmmaker is in a unique position to continue this journey between fiction and reality, striking the notion that both are, by and large, one and the same through the eyes of cinema… or well he could do something completely different. Whatever that turns out to be, I await it eagerly.

Birth. Movies. Death. / Devin Faraci

An extraordinary movie anchored by an astonishing performance by a non-actor. 

It is possible that Felt is the first film in a new offshoot of the rape/revenge genre – rape culture/revenge. It is certain that Felt is a beautiful film from one of the most exciting new directors working today, anchored by an astonishing performance by an artist without any previous acting experience.

Director Jason Banker has a unique way of making movies. In both Felt and his debut,Toad Road, Becker follows real people around with his camera, getting into their lives and then creating a story within that. The result is something so completely naturalistic it’s not clear where reality ends and fiction begins. In the case of Felt Amy Everson, an artist, plays Amy, an artist, who has been suffering PTSD following an unexplained – but certainly sexual – trauma. Amy creates art that takes her out of her identity, fashioning masks and muscle suits and giant penises she wears, seemingly to reclaim the power taken from her by her unnamed attacker.

As the film opens Amy’s friends are trying to get her back into the world, and we follow her, almost vignette style, as she tries to interact with men, and we see how each man is, in his own way, a total fucking creep or asshole. When she meets Kenny, played by always-working indie movie mainstay Kentucky Audler, it seems like she’s finally found the right guy, but then again this is a movie playing at Fantastic Fest…

Felt could be described as a slow burn, but that would be ignoring the film’s true center, which is Everson herself. She’s in just about every single frame of the movie, and if she didn’t work – if she was as irritatingly quirky as an artist who makes felt penises might be – the film would collapse. But Everson is an astonishing presence, a woman who embodies the idea that we’re stronger in the places where we are broken. Everson is equal parts charming and dark, intense and silly, and the way she fiercely shares her fragility makes her a completely engaging protagonist. Everything about Everson, from her toy-strewn room to her voice, makes you love her.

Which makes her mental decay all the more unsettling. For much of its running time Felt could be just another 20something mumblecore relationship movie, but as the third act comes into focus Banker begins tightening the grip of suspense. We know something bad is going to happen, and that ugliness is constantly on the horizon. Banker infuses scenes with a quiet dread that becomes a thrumming fear by the end.

If I have one complaint about Felt it’s that I would have liked to see the ending go even bigger, and nastier. Maybe that’s just the jaded Fantastic Fester in me, but the climax feels too fast after the incredible build up. Still, it’s a minor complaint because Felt isn’t really about the act of violence at the end of the film, it’s about all the small, almost invisible acts of violence visited upon women every single day of their lives.

All Things Horror / Mike Snoonian

Fantastic Fest: FELT Is A Powerful Rumination On Trauma

Felt is unlike any other movie I’ve watched not only at Fantastic Fest, but anywhere else this past year. Two features into his young film career, Jason Banker (TOAD ROAD) is establishing himself as someone that can deliver very personal tales of horror of those that exists outside the margins. Felt is a movie that delivers a giant “fuck you” to rape culture, and to anyone that would tell victims of the systemic abuse of male privilege to just get over it. FELT achieves this by following performance artist Amy Everson for three months, and allowing to cameras to roll at every opportunity. From there Banker culls together his footage from her everyday life and interactions until he and Everson (credited as a co-writer) found the story they want to tell. The result is a very real, moving and often disturbing portrait of a young woman suffering from PSTD as a fallout of sexual violence. While her friends try to drag her out of her shell and back to the real world, Amy retreats into her homemade costumes. In lesser hands FELT would fall prey to having its own head too far up its ass for anyone to watch it. What makes the film so compelling is Everson’s honesty with the camera trained on her. Every guy she encounters is a complete asshole. Whether it’s her best friend’s verbally abusive boyfriend (who threatens to knock Amy out at one point because he “doesn’t care that she’s a girl.” Yay, equality!) to an OK Cupid scuzz bag that joke about putting roofies in Amy’s drink then tries to justify his joke by claiming roofies don’t exist, they’re just something women make up to excuse slutty behavior. During these confrontations we see Amy at her best. She refuses to back down and eat the heaping plate of shit men are shoveling in front of her. Whether she’s sticking her jaw defiantly in front of the man threatening to knock her on her ass or laying verbal haymakers on a rape apologist, Everson shows she is far more than a scared woman in hiding you initially make her out to be. As the film’s narrative takes a more cohesive shape in the latter stages, Amy meets one man she believes she can trust, and as the relationship unfolds we see her come out of her shell. In he film’s most poignant moment, she tells him that it isn’t just fear that forced her to retreat to her costumes (all of which are males) but also exhaustion. To be a woman is to constantly be threatened with sexual violence, or to be exploited for the whims of men. To be a woman means always having to be watchful and on guard and to have male privilege thrust in one’s face in ways both large and small every day and to have to always face that is just….damn….exhausting.

Since happily ever afters are a rarity at Fantastic Fest, things culminate in a bloody, messy fashion. It’s the lone moment of violence in the film, yet it’s a cathartic one. It’s almost a shame Felt ends when it does, as it would have been fascinating to follow the repercussions, and see if this marked a moment of retreat, or of pushing forward.

Austin Chronicle / Richard Whittaker

Fantastic Fest 2014: How It Felt

Artist Amy Everson on trauma and truth

Amy Everson is not a screen actress by first calling: But that did not stop her taking the Best Actress award in the Fantastic Fest Next wave category for her performance in Felt.

In the new film from director Jason Banker (Toad Road), Everson plays Amy, a somewhat fictionalized version of herself in her own life. Amy creates strange costumes: sometimes grotesque, sometimes caricatured, always highly imbued with subtexts and implications of sexuality and gender roles. Over time, it becomes clear that Amy’s work is tied to deep personal trauma, and the audience follows her psychological unraveling through these body-redefining creations.

Everson’s dress sense had already been getting attention before the awards ceremony. She and her boyfriend, throughout the festival, have worn matching outfits, the exact same clothing. She says, “On the first night, we were just walking from the place that we were staying. We got to the train tracks, and we stopped there, and then the car that was stopped there, the trunk opened slowly. We were like, oh my god, what is happening? It’s completely dark, nothing around, and we’re like, oh, we’re going to die. Then the driver winds down his window and goes, ‘What are you guys wearing, you guys look awesome!’ He ended up giving us a ride here.”

In the trunk?

“We never knew why the trunk opened.”

Austin Chronicle: The costumes are so part of everything that’s going on in Felt.

Jason Banker: That was the thing that first attracted me to Amy, her art and seeing these things that she made. As a filmmaker, you want very strong visuals, and have images that people will walk away [and have them] burned into their brains. The stuff that she makes is so visceral, it says so much, you don’t have to explain it. I wanted to unravel the mystery of what it means.

AC: Where did you first find her work?

JB: I was shooting something else in San Francisco, and me and a friend were hanging out at this bar, Pop Scene.

Amy Everson: I have a tendency of just randomly kidnapping people from clubs. A friend of mine and me, we would just pick up strangers and then terrorize them, and Banker just happened to be one of those people that night.

JB: She was just explaining the things that she did, and we said, ‘We need to see these costumes.’ We went to her house, and then we saw her bedroom, and I just went, you’ve got to be kidding me, this is amazing. Seeing her art, seeing her world, it took me a year and a half not being able to forget it, that I was like, we have to make a film.

AC: Any artistic process can be cathartic, especially when it’s so intimate and personal. Did making the film change how you approach your current work, or how you see your earlier work?

AE: I think the process wasn’t cathartic, per se. I was going through a lot, and the story unfolded organically because of what was going on in my life. It just happened to happen while he was with me. I think the reception has been the most cathartic and healing, in that it resonates with people. I have people, men and women, come up to me and tell me about their experiences, and tell me how they really felt moved and impacted by the film. It was nothing that I ever imagined while going through the process. I was just living my life, just with a camera there.

AC: That makes Roxanne an interesting addition, as the best friend/enabler. How did you come on board?

Roxanne Knouse: I met Jason eight years ago, and he asked me to be in Toad Road. I was going to, but then I didn’t, because at that point it was kind of going to be the same thing that happened with Amy. For separate reasons: I was pretty out of control, and at 21 years old, I couldn’t approach myself and my own demons. But when he talked to me about Amy, because he knows me pretty well, it resonated with me and my experiences, and I wanted to be a part of it. I wanted to showcase women supporting each other. When I come to the film, it’s me going, no, go be weird, and I’m supporting you in that. The other characters in the film are like, be normal, get over it, try to rush your healing – make her fit into something that makes her feel comfortable. Not giving a care about how she’s really feeling. ‘You’re making us feel weird with your pain.’ So I wanted to showcase how someone who would understand that would react, and not shut that down, and actually make it grow.

AC: Let’s talk about your art background, because these suits are an unusual medium to work in.

AE: They originally started as just costumes for fun, and then I would wear them for fun and to freak people out, and then I would meet strangers and make them wear them. That concept intrigued Baker, and he wanted to explore that. But I think the source of why a lot of the art I make is based on genitalia and human bodies is taking control of what hurt me in my life. It’s touched upon in the film, and I think I’m building on my own experiences, and taking control of them.

AC: Was there ever a point where this was going to be a more conventional art documentary?

JB: That’s what I brought to the table, and those are my sensibilities. I like to think that it’s a unique approach to making films. Mixing it [so that] we do incorporate fiction, and we let the fantasy happen. This goes further than what reality is, and it also lets an audience bring a little bit more of themselves into the work as well.

AC: How much did the film shape the costumes, and how much did the costumes shape the film?

JB: We did a lot of workshopping where I just shot with her, and there were things that I didn’t even know were going to be in the film. I knew that I wanted to shoot in the redwoods. I love nature, and the beauty of setting people against these huge trees. That first scene where you see the suit, I said, ‘let’s go into the woods, and you’re going to wear this suit, and we’re just going to shoot some stuff.’ It was like magic. And I didn’t know that I was going to be using it in the film, but making that choice led to other choices. Later on, there’s a repetition of that, but it goes another way. To me, I’d rather work that way than with a script where I know everything that is going to happen. You get to construct something organic that doesn’t feel contrived, it doesn’t feel like you’ve seen it before. You’re just creating, and that’s Amy’s art to me. She’s just creating these very powerful things [and] maybe she doesn’t know how it will resonate.

AC: That puts a lot of emphasis on you, since he was following your lead and giving you an almost quasi-director role.

AE: Right. It was a blank slate. He said, ‘What story would you want to tell,’ and I wasn’t completely sure, but I thought about my life and how my experiences have informed my artwork, and I have basically purged everything. I think a lot of the film was Banker’s picking and choosing of what would come together as a story. I gave him a lot of material. I put on every costume, I pulled out old journal entries and read them. I pulled out a lot of ghosts and demons, and somehow through his editorial magic he was able to create a story.

Complex / Matt Barone

Felt

Director: Jason Banker Stars: Amy Everson, Kentucker Audley, Roxanne Knouse

The festival’s best female performance, by far, goes to Felt‘s Amy Everson, though there’s a catch—Everson basically plays herself, albeit with some fictionalized brutality.

I’ll stop right there in regards to the “brutality.” Essentially, writer-director Jason Banker’s (Toad Road) Felt is a fascinating examination of a social misfit, Amy (Everson), whose preoccupations with death and making penises and other knick-knack oddities out of felt (including a “Fetal Hitler” doll) leave her unable to connect to other people. That changes when she meets Kenny (Kentucker Audley), a genuinely nice guy who understands her, loves her, and gets her to open up and embrace romance.

The film is a sappy love story, though—it’s as close to a Kate Hudson movie as something Lars von Trier would make. Adding to Felt‘s intrigue is its unique backstory—Banker randomly met Everson a few years back and casually started filming her, and most of the film comes from that documentary-style coverage. Because of that, it’s an unusually authentic look at love’s darkest sides.

Felt is currently without official distribution. Hopefully that changes with the quickness.

ScreenCrush / Britt Hayes

Reel Women: The Women Were Fierce at Fantastic Fest 2014

The Fantastic Fest film festival in Austin provides us with tons of genre films every year, and as such, we’re often treated to some grim and violent narratives — narratives which can typically include violence perpetrated against women and can sometimes skew a bit on the masculine side of things. But this year’s festival was wonderfully diverse and filled with some incredibly fierce female-oriented features, ranging from smart and terrifying horror to darkly comedic and biting family dramas, and a seriously brilliant satire on gender politics.

Walking around the fest this year, the most talked about films featured strong female performances. ‘Force Majeure’ was a definite favorite, an exceedingly dark comedic drama about a family on vacation in the French Alps and what happens when the father of that family deserts them right when an avalanche almost hits. What follows is an increasingly and gloriously uncomfortable battle between an exasperated mother and a cowardly father, a contemplation on false masculinity — a more sophisticated and female-focused version of the totally batshit ‘Escape from Tomorrow,’ if you will. Lisa Loven Kongsli’s performance as the fed-up Ebba is a beautifully complex thing to behold — even something as simple as a scene in which she brushes her teeth while glaring in the mirror alongside her husband speaks silent volumes to the rattling of her mind. Ebba is intolerant and toys with her husband, testing him in subtle but hilarious ways, pushing him to step up and be the man and father he projects himself to be. The film asks many questions about selfishness and selflessness, but it also posits the notion that women are inherently more ferocious and braver than our male counterparts. Ultimately, men are just big weenies.

Other films which received a lot of praise this year were ‘The Babadook’ and ‘It Follows,’ both of which are horror films with strong female leads, and are helping to prove that the genre still has fresh perspectives and the ability to scare us senseless. I reviewed both films separately, but there’s another film that deserves some serious attention: Jason Banker’s ‘Felt,’ his low-key sophomore effort, which follows a fascinating artist and sexual assault survivor named Amy. ‘Felt’ stars real life artist Amy Everson, who created all the pieces in the film herself. Banker was inspired by Everson, her work, and her story, and collaborated with her on the film. Much of it is shot documentary-style, which allows for us to connect more intimately with Amy, which is especially crucial in the film’s more horrific moments. ‘Felt’ examines the difficult struggle of trying to reclaim your life post-trauma, as Amy tries to take agency for herself using her art in some wonderfully bizarre ways, but it’s also a great, damning exploration of rape culture and sexism, and how that culture can nebulously extend past the act of rape itself. ‘Felt’ hits on a very specific, personal, and relatable topic in ways that are so poignant. No other film has approached these precise ideas before, and that in and of itself is pretty exceptional.

For all the dark and grim stuff we see at a genre festival, a movie like ‘Jacky in the Kingdom of Women’ is a breath of fresh air. A joyous satire on gender politics starring Charlotte Gainsbourg? Yes, please. The film takes place in a fictive land where women rule as a militant faction, led by a dictator and her daughter (Gainsbourg), who is soon to be wed off before she can succeed to the highest ranking. But first she must choose her “Big Dummy” to marry, so her mother throws a ball, inviting all the eligible boys in the land to buy a ticket to attend and vie for her affections. The boys in the film wear burqa-esque garb and are treated as housewives and do all the chores, the people in the kingdom eat mush that looks like semen and comes out of their plumbing, and everyone worships horses — because what’s girlier than horses? ‘Jacky in the Kingdom of Women’ is like a gender-swapped ‘Cinderella’ set in a place that’s like North Korea meets the French countryside. It’s riotous and joyful and weird, and its gender politics are very tongue-in-cheek. This isn’t a film that’s trying to cut deep into something — it’s just gleefully making a jerk-off motion and rolling its eyes while saying, “Yeah, well, how do you like this crap?” The delightfulness of the film could probably best be embodied by a scene in which our young male protagonist is accosted by female militants in the woods, who masturbate in front of him and force him to suck on their breasts — a strange sigh of relief at a genre festival where we’re so used to seeing the roles reversed.

There were so many more great films and women at Fantastic Fest this year that it’s hard to discuss them all — ‘Darkness by Day’ was a neat but minor take on an old horror convention, one that had us empathize with characters we never would have in a worn-out narrative. The lead actresses in films like ‘Alleluia,’ ‘Spring,’ ‘Blind,’ and ‘Goodnight Mommy’ were all so vital and so lovely, and really anchored those films with amazing performances.

Each and every year Fantastic Fest delivers some surprising films, but this year more than any other year, there was a real prevalence of great women on screen — so much so that I didn’t even get around to seeing all of their work. So often with genre films we think of action, violence, and horror, and these things can typically not be kind to their female characters, but Fantastic Fest really proves that there are some great female-centric genre films being made every year.

FilmBizarro / Ronny

Plot: Amy is an artist who spends her spare time dressed in a costume so that she can feel like someone else. Her past has screwed up her view of men and now she’s attempting to get through the traumas.

Our thoughts: It’s been a year since we “Toad Road”, a previous indie hit by filmmaker Jason Banker, and nearly 10 months since we decided it was one of the best movies of last year. Obviously “Toad Road” wasn’t just luck – it was well beyond that – but would his next feature be able to reach the same heights? I decided to not get too hyped up for this one, and kept my “research” vague, to be fully invested once I finally got to see it.

Where “Toad Road” took some liberties and became a very creepy, eerie experience, “Felt” keeps us much closer to reality. The movie is about Amy, a young artist (or weirdo, if you were to ask the people around her), and her struggle with life, her body and men. She seeks solace in homemade costumes, to emotionally feel like she’s not herself anymore. Her most common costume to put on is that of a naked man. When Amy meets Kenny she finally feels as though she can trust a man and be herself around him.

“Felt” feels like it’s somewhere between a quirky indie comedy and an early Ming-liang Tsai film. There are many funny moments in the movie, but it’s not really a comedy though. It is weird and quirky though. From the opening sequence and up until the finale we’re treated to a very somber journey of an emotionally scarred woman. She dreams of putting a needle up the urethra of a penis, so it’s easy to reach the conclusion that she has a strange past involving men. But the movie goes further than just showing that she has unresolved issues with men – we see her insecurities and we see her change her “skin”. But we also see strengths in Amy, though they manifest themselves in her power to be herself.

The movie takes a while to fully introduce us to Amy, and for a while it seemed like the point was to just experience what Amy experiences. It’s when Amy meets another woman, at a photo shoot, who seems like an outsider herself that we finally get to the meat of “Felt”. It’s when we see who Amy is when she’s with someone who gets her, but it’s also when she finally gets to face her traumas. Later that same night she and her new friend meet Kenny, and the movie takes a turn into a quirky romance. Except, the good kind. One where we’re rooting for the lead because we’ve been through her miserable existence, and we want it to change. But Amy’s scars are too deep to heal, as the ending might show.

I’m positive that if you enjoyed “Toad Road” then this is a movie for you. It might be just as good, at times even better, than the wonderful “Toad Road”, and that’s huge. I think that “Toad Road” was more unique, but Jason Banker teamed up with Amy Everson have created a much more relatable and grounded, but also an even darker, movie. We become one with the lead character in a way that “Toad Road” didn’t quite succeed with.

Jason Banker’s cinematic style is to let us witness the mental state of a person. We feel it and become part of it. In “Toad Road” it was more of the existential atmosphere surrounding the characters and the events, and in “Felt” we’re becoming part of Amy and her struggle, following her into the darkness. He has managed to take full advantage of his style with “Felt”. Before it’s over, we feel as crazy and weird as Amy.

“Felt” offers a little bit of everything. It has quirky, somewhat immature comedy bits – sometimes involving farts or graphic nude costumes of gaping vaginas (or paintings of Goatse), it has the troubled young artist angle, it sways between sad and happy – back and forth, it’s visually intriguing and at the same time it keeps a naturalistic style to it. The movie’s title is highly appropriate, it’s a movie that feels. It’s has a bit of ambiguity, but I don’t think the intent was to be ambiguous in the same way that an arthouse movie often tries to – this just left out whatever Amy didn’t feel like sharing. This is not a movie for everyone, but I do think it’s a movie for the Film Bizarro crowd.

Positive things:

– Jason Banker and Amy Everson teaming up proved to be fantastic.

– Filled with excellent actors.

– Beautifully shot.

– It might not always be eventful, but it jumps between moods enough to never bore us.

– Has some weirdly funny moments.

– The nude costumes are brilliantly inappropriate.

– The ending.

Negative things:

– Could easily be pushed into the typical indie drama category, but it succeeds in ways that most don’t if you just give it the time to.

– Not really a negative thing, but a small constraint: I strongly believe this is a movie to either watch on the big screen, or all alone in a dark room.

Rating: Gore: 0.5/5 Nudity: 2/5 Story: 3.5/5 Effects: 3/5 Comedy: 2.5/5

We got this movie from: Jason Banker

It can be bought from: N/A

Cinapse / Jon Partridge

FANTASTIC FEST X: DAY 7. KUNG FU ELLIOT, DUKE OF BURGUNDY, FELT & NORWAY

Many can see a piece of art and be baffled by it, not understanding its connections or its intent. Felt shows how profoundly deep a connection an artist can have with their work as form of communication and an outlet, a way to express inner emotions such as joy and pain.Felt manifests this connection in a very tangible way and more importantly than that, it highlights an issue with society about the frequency of violence towards women and its tolerance of it.

Director Jason Banker approaches his filmmaking in a abstract way, he selects a subject and begins filming their lives and together with the subject takes it on a path informed but not led by the reality of the subject to create a story. In Felt, Amy Everson (deserved winner of the FF 2014 Best Actor award) plays Amy, an artist who is evidently the victim of sexual abuse. Through her art, she takes on new identities, making masks and body suits outfitted with male and female genitalia. Often dressing up in these guises and wandering the forest as a man, perhaps as a role-reversal to try and regain a position of strength. Her friends, aware of her history, try to push her into moving past it and her coping mechanism to move on with her life. One evening she encounters the quiet but sweet Kenny (Kentucker Audley) and begins to feel she can trust again.

Felt is one of the most profoundly affecting experiences I had at this festival. Everson is an immense presence in the film, moreso when you know she isn’t a professional actress. She starts out as a weird, damaged character but soon envelops you with her personality: quirky, odd, dark, creative, strong and yet intensely vulnerable. Banker has helped to fashion something very intimate in his collaboration with her, a journey as she copes, heals and is yet again hurt. Tonal shifts and editing issues can cause emotional beats to peter out but these are small issues in a powerful and personal piece of work. Felt offers no real answers or solutions, in fact there is a bleakness in how it seems to show the perpetuation of the cycle of abuse against women and perhaps that is the point. It is a cycle that will continue in a culture that fails to deal with what is termed “rape culture” and informs a plethora of issues towards women.

Felt is a incredible organic collaboration between a filmmaker and his subject that has spawned a very personal piece of cinema. Profoundly affecting work.

WIRED / Jordan Crucchiola

The Sad One: Felt

This one is all eerie mood. It came onto the scene at Fantastic Fest and even though this trailer doesn’t give us much to go on, we’re already shrinking back into our chairs. Our heroine Amy (Amy Everson) is an artist suffering from PTSD after some sort of past trauma. We don’t know what Amy’s been through, but given the stark emptiness and sad piano music we’re given here, safe to say it was somethingreally bad. As Amy isolates herself from friends, she pours herself into her disarming art, and meets a young man who could provide some respite from her pain. Or something terrible will happen. Either way, we want to find out.

Pause At: 0:28 to feel unsettled, and 0:34 to feel it again.

Fangoria / Samuel Zimmerman

Fantastic Fest Report: Horror is Alive, Vital and Varied

Decidedly unsupernatural is FELT, of which director Jason Banker’s empathy is integral. Banker, a doc filmmaker who made his narrative debut with the raw, hallucinatory TOAD ROAD experiments with traditional genre by focusing on a real life subject and building a fictional tale around them. With FELT, he’s turned his camera on Amy Everson, an enthralling artist and first time performer (certainly not last, she is incredible). Fascinated by Everson’s felt art, including full costumes, baby Hitlers and fake penises, Banker’s observational aesthetic chronicles her life of inner anguish following sexual assault, the ensuing trauma and the regularly hostile attitude the world has toward women. For a male filmmaker, or male audience, the latter is inherently impossible to understand, so it is vital it’s met with empathy and belief. Banker and his camera do just that by capturing candid moments that lay bare what women are met with on a daily basis. Banker is just as observational of Everson’s art, giving her the filmic space in which to don her costumes (some of which are cartoonishly muscular) and fake sexual appendages, and explore rural landscape to try and gain an agency or power she feels lacking. The most alive section of the film finds Amy spend an uncompromising evening with friend and similarly frustrated Roxanne (Roxanne Lauren Knouse). It builds and descends to more of a recognizably genre destination, but like TOAD ROAD, Banker’s horror isn’t what you think or want. FELT is indicative of a more artful rape-revenge film (though that categorization isn’t exactly fair or worthy), one that isn’t just a costumed exploitation movie. Thus, what should be its ultimate visceral act is trumped by an utterly haunting final image, one that’s again lensed with empathy.

larry411 / Alex White

Fantastic Fest 2014 Review: “Felt” Digs Deep Into the Darkest Depths of the Soul

Oftentimes the most difficult films to think, talk, and write about are the ones that affect us so personally that they open up old wounds.  Wounds that you thought were closed or wounds with scars that you never ever wanted to be ripped open. These films cause us to look at ourselves in a new light and invoke certain memories that we struggle to once again hide in the back of our conscience.

One of those films is Felt. The film, which had its World Premiere at Fantastic Fest, is a startling semi-autobiographical story of a young woman named Amy (Amy Everson) who struggles to deal with significant emotional trauma from her childhood.  As director Jason Banker (Toad Road) noted after the film, Felt serves as an example of an “extreme case” of what could happen to someone who experiences severe trauma and what that trauma does to the psyche of the victim and those who surround them.

Banker’s haunting second narrative feature finds a way to perfectly illustrate the distorted world victims of trauma live in for the years after whatever ordeal they suffer through. In Amy’s case, this trauma is of the sexual variety and sets off what would be perceived as an odd fascination with both male and female genitalia to those who may not have experienced any sort of significant sexual or childhood trauma in their lives. Amy also wears several homemade costumes (made by Everson herself) in the film to help her create several alter egos to hide her true self from the world or the world from her. To Amy, her fascinations seem justified and perfectly normal. To the commoner, she seems insane or weird at the very least.

Everson, a full-time artist, won the Best Actress award in the Fantastic Fest Dell Next Wave category for her performance and the award couldn’t have been more deserved.  For example, when we first see Amy’s bedroom in the film, it’s covered in homemade sexual paraphernalia including countless felt penises (which Amy also makes herself in real life along with her partner Michael).  Despite that bizarreness, the scene that develops in the aforementioned bedroom burns on the screen thanks to Everson’s performance as she conveys the incredible sense of the pain someone like herself and others like her feel every day when dealing with their trauma.

That overwhelming sense of pain is what makes Felt resonate within somebody who deals with the struggles of experiencing any sort of childhood trauma like Amy did in the film. Throughout the film, Amy struggles with any sort of relationship whether the relationship is platonic like with her friends Alanna (Alanna Reynolds), an ambiguous relationship like with Roxanne (Roxanne Lauren Knouse), or a romantic one like with Kenny (Kentucker Audley). Basic social functions and norms are not easily attainable.  This is quite evident with Amy and something I can identify with completely.

The depiction of these relationship and social struggles allowed Felt to find a place in my heart forever.  I have long dealt with a childhood full of bullying, adolescent relationship failures of the most disastrous kind and even some cases of severe bullying that caused some deep emotional trauma that I haven’t told even my own parents about.  Not until I saw Felt during Fantastic Fest did I feel that someone else was out there that I could really relate to and identify even the darkest pain I’ve felt with. When you see the film, you’ll realize that real life Amy has obviously not gone to the absolute extremes that the film version of Amy ultimately goes to when dealing with her pain. Despite that, I was able truly connect and empathize with a character on an intimate level for the first time in years. I felt I was seeing a bit of myself on the screen. I wasn’t alone.

Jason Banker’s Felt is simply a deeply moving emotional tour-de-force and one of the most fantastically intense films you will see all year. In fact, Felt is not only my favorite film of Fantastic Fest 2014 but my favorite film I’ve seen this year. The film takes risks and is not afraid to go where it needs and wants to go. Rape, sexual trauma, and bullying all have consequences and those consequences do not and will not go away. Ever.

Felt is raw, honest and beautiful.  Perhaps most importantly, Felt is unabashedly real.

As of publication of this piece, Felt is without distribution. Let’s get some distribution for this film already. If any film out of Fantastic Fest 2014 deserves to be seen by the masses, Felt is that film.

TwitchFilm / Shelagh M. Rowan-Legg

Fantastic Fest 2014 Wrap: Over 70 Movies Reviewed + Our Top Picks!

Force Majeure It’s not exactly a genre film, but it blew me away with amazing storytelling, great acting, beautiful cinematography and its dark, comic look at masculinity and family. Runner-up: Felt Part autobiography, part fiction, this is a strange and beautiful film that made me cry more than I have a film in a long time. Its sophisticated and raw look at reaction to trauma is astonishing. 

The 13th Floor / Steve Austin

Fantastic Fest 2014 – The Best of the Fest

FELT – A young woman confronts overbearing patriarchy by designing and taking on several alter egos in tandem with tackling some dark issues from her personal life. This is Writer/Director Jason Banker’s second film (the first, TOAD ROAD, is criminally under-seen in New Zealand) and he has cemented himself as an independant talent to watch, with a voice that is always clear and focussed on opening up the truth within characters, I went into this one knowing virtually nothing about what I was viewing and was rewarded ten-fold with an incredible little movie with huge heart, an even greater sense of ferocity and a disquieting, unique visual style. I did not find out until afterward that this film – involving felted realistic looking phalluses, a foetal Hitler and a non-linear sense of story-telling – was derived from the lead actresses own experiences and art. Genuine, beautifully crafted and quite unsettling.

The Film Stage / Bill Graham

Felt – Fantastic Fest 2014 Review

Being challenged and shocked by a film can be both a blessing and a curse. Inevitably it will alienate many, but those that show up to the genre film festival known as Fantastic Fest are game. Mixing slow-building dread and mental health issues, Felt arrives as a needle prick of chaos. This is the kind of film that many will receive the main actress with open arms for giving things like a “brave” performance and more, but will shirk off the film as a whole as a bit too downtrodden to have much commercial or critical appeal. However, any time a film revolves around a creative person’s dealing with trauma, likely sexual in nature in Felt, and the ramifications it can have, you get a sense of who is in for a film that isn’t exactly a pleasure to watch but might offer insight or perspective in a way other directors shy away from.

Director Jason Banker has a tendency to capture events in interesting ways. In this film he uses first-time actress Amy Everson as Amy, a woman who is coping with an unexplained trauma that tends to haunt her dreams and creates an odd tension with her friends. She’s outspoken, honest, but also fiercely loyal and intelligent. She creates alter egos and is a bit of a crafter, creating costumes of various kinds that explore the male perspective in many ways. She creates pants with a fake felt penis that she trounces around the nearby forest with, putting it in places it doesn’t belong. Additionally, Amy fashions muscle suits and seems to be focusing on the male dynamic. Her obsession with escaping through these means starts to alienate her from her closest friends but it also begins to create new and interesting friendships with people who see her as a kindred spirit.

As her friends attempt to drag her out of her morose and languid behavior, Amy goes on a few dates and we learn that without adequate buffering, normal occurrences in in adult relationships often come too fast, too soon. To call most of her male suitors assholes is easy, but why they were ever presented is troublesome as well. If we can’t count on our friends to have a good sense of filtering, who can we trust? But things change for the better when Amy and her friend, who have been using their sexual power in a way to reverse the dynamics, run into Kenny (Kentucker Audley). He’s sweet, charming, and isn’t afraid to let Amy breathe and have her space. He is the ideal guy in many ways, embracing her creativity and unique qualities.

But the film wouldn’t be at a festival like Fantastic Fest if they simply ride off into the sunset, and to be sure, Banker has been slowly building a sense of dread throughout. Amy’s language has become more violent in ways that aren’t rational. She is focused on the male genitalia in a way that makes one feel uncomfortable for everyone around her, even Kenny. By the shocking conclusion, we fully grasp just why a film can affect us so much. People do cruel things to each other every day. Whether this is a revenge narrative or not, the way in which Felt works is truly unsettling.

B –

Anna Hanks

If You Liked “Tiny Furniture” See “Felt”

In the week or so following Fantastic Fest, the film that’s been living in my head is “Felt.”
Directed by Jason Banker (“Toad Road“) “Felt” is the movie I can’t stop turning over in my mind. It’s held onto me the way Lena Dunham’s debut feature “Tiny Furniture” has held onto me, claiming permanent space in my brain the way that few other films have done.

That feels special to me, because this is the week that at least a certain segment of our culture seems to be obsessed with Dunham’s new memoir, “Not That Kind of Girl.”

Of course, pick any week and our country seems to be talking about the 27 year-old Dunham. Dunham discussion topics include: any episode of her HBO television show “Girls,” the $3.7 million she was paid for her memoir and Dunham’s decision to go ahead and pay the opening acts for her book tour—a tour where tickets were being scalped for 900 bucks each in NYC.

In contrast, “Felt” is a small mumblecore-ish film featuring a women who collects and fabricates multiple depictions of genitalia. In her bedroom, these representations are collected and displayed the way that someone else might obsess over Mickey Mouse charms or china birds. She also makes and wears a homemade “naked man” suit throughout much of the film, which is sometimes replaced by a “naked woman” suit.

The film stars performance artist Amy Everson (who won the “Next Wave” Spotlight Competition best actress award at Fantastic Fest this year for her performance), who made all of the costumes, and the film was created around her experiences. It’s sort of a quasi-documentary, semi-fictionalized film. Read this fabulous interview about the process of making the film.

I’ll admit that at Fantastic Fest I was motived to watch the film by the passionate insistence of my film critic friend Alex White, who wrote a moving personal testimony of what the film meant to him, along with a plea for it to find distribution.

The film explores gender, patriarchy and male privilege in a way that I wasn’t expecting.

Felt is a powerful piece of art, and it needs to be seen by more people.

We Are Movie Geeks / Michael Haffner

Fantastic Fest 2014: FELT – The Review

An uncomfortable feeling hit me almost immediately while watching Jason Banker’s new film. It was a mix of guilt and shame that lasted up until the brutal and heartbreaking ending. This guilt and shame isn’t attributed to anything I felt guilty for in particular, but more as a man living in a world where I acknowledge that there are deep rooted problems regarding gender, sex and violence, and as last year’s popular song illustrates, the “Blurred Lines” that are often trivialized by society. FELT brings to light the effects of “rape culture” in our society and how normal it has become to dismiss actions by saying “that’s just boys being boys.” Banker’s gorgeous looking film highlights some of the not so pretty situations that we as a society have become accustomed to viewing without thinking about its effects on the victim. He turns what would be shown as just a normal party sequence in most films, where a few girls are offered to enjoy in some alcoholic drinks with some enthusiastic guys, as an example of a problem that goes far beyond just male dominance and its psychological effects on women. FELT has a statement to make but not one that takes away from its thoughtful and impressive storytelling.

Amy (Amy Everson) is an artist living in California who weaves a world of dark satire through her knitted creations. When she’s not creating a woven baby Hitler or an anatomical vagina, she spends her days in an alter ego like state where she slips on a nude leotard with an attached plastic penis, draws facial hair on herself and pretends to act like a man. Her problem with meeting guys doesn’t initially fade away when she meets Kenny (Kentucker Audley). It’s only as their relationship slowly develops that we see Amy drop her guard and exist in a happier place. But how long can her personal happiness last?

Like his previous film TOAD ROAD – which I like more in theory rather than the actual experience – Banker employs a mix of documentary and story to form a film that blurs the line between reality and fiction. Apparently the film is based on Amy Everson’s real experiences. Most of the film highlights her natural life as she almost floats through this world in a dreamlike state. She clearly feels more comfortable living in her own headspace, but it is when she encounters strangers or her concerned friends that her odd and occasionally dark sense of humor comes out. She’s an unpredictable character and Banker takes full advantage of this when the film spirals into darker territory.

Amy is dealing with some deep-rooted issues that are hinted at but are never exactly spelled out. Like most people dealing with psychological and possible physical damage, Amy is presented in an imperfect light. She’s not the best at conversations and doesn’t go out of her way to impress any of the lecherous men she encounters. At the same time, you begin to feel there’s a small level of self-infliction that she puts herself through. This may seem like I’m excusing such rude and inappropriate actions at times, but there’s a moment early on when she is on a date with a guy that she clearly is not interested in but continues to go along with. The date wraps-up and he walks her home but not before she shows him one of her favorite trees. She crawls up under the low-hanging tree and sits quietly as her eager date follows. He sits next to her and attempts to kiss her but is met with a turning of her face – clearly indicating she is not interested. Time passes while the two sit there and he attempts to kiss her one more time. Again he is met with the turning of her face. She never says “no” but more importantly she never actually leaves. There are several other times where she places herself in situations that she is not comfortable in but stays as if this is some self-induced torture for her. It is as if that she is waiting to break under the pressure. Like she intentionally wants to snap.

It’s an uncomfortable feeling being a male and witnessing degrading male behavior – things that are too common in our everyday lives – but also because you feel this character that we have come to care for exist in situations that are out of her control while occasionally partially in her control. I’m not sure if the director intended for this reading or not. Given where Amy stands by the end of the film, I assume we are supposed to believe that she might just be a little crazy – which makes her long and hard journey all the more upsetting.

FELT is a compelling and deeply tragic look at an artist that refuses to turn away from the problems she sees in the world. A haunting and melodic score by the band Deaf Center sets the tone of the film perfectly. Your reaction to the film and its effect of you will ultimately depend on your willingness to accept the underlying issues that are at the heart of Banker and co-writer Amy Everson’s story. Sometimes the most obvious problems have been right in front of us the entire time. Most likely FELT won’t be readily available to the general public, but like the message of the film, it doesn’t mean it should be ignored.

Overall rating: 4.5 out of 5

Paste / Tim Basham

Tripping the Fest Fantastic / A look at the best films of the 2014 festival

As a testament to actress Amy Everson’s ability, for a moment I thought I had misread the summary on Felt and was watching a documentary. Her performance as a traumatized young artist (also named Amy) is that real. Director Jason Banker adeptly pulls us into Amy’s frequent escapes from the real world by creepily dressing like a life-size version of a rape victim’s therapy puppets. Over time, she allows herself to love again when she enters into a relationship with Kenny (Kentucker Audley), a move that leads to more trauma and pushes toward a powerful, dark ending.

Fantastic Fest – Next Wave Spotlight Award – Best Actress