Screen Scene: Local film news

LOOK HERE: A still from 'Ouroboros,' directed by Asheville filmmaker Emma Keehan. The short drama recently played at the Real to Reel Film Festival in Kings Mountain. Photo courtesy of Keehan

• Asheville-based filmmaker Emma Keehan’s short work Ouroboros was selected for the Real to Reel Film Festival in Kings Mountain, where it screened on July 26. The eight-minute drama centers on a masked female dancer who, trapped in an oppressive artistic system, experiences an epiphany.

Keehan created the film in professor Tate Bunker’s Collaborative Filmmaking course in 2016 while attending at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She was elected to direct the piece by her classmates.

“To come up with such a unique and interesting story, we took an old book of poems and extracted a sentence from random poems throughout the entire book, putting together one stanza of ‘nonsense,’” Keehan says. “We then all wrote a script based on our new poem, whittled down to a select few, combined a few ideas from the others and came up with the Ouroboros story.”

The film was completed in just under three months and won the school’s student film festival. It’s since won five awards, including the Grand Jury Prize at the Midwest Independent Film Festival last August and Best Wisconsin Film at the 2018 Milwaukee Short Film Festival. Keehan has been living in Asheville for nearly a year and also works as an education mentor. funnybrainfilms.com

• Quentin Tarantino’s new 1969-set film, Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, features two actors with Asheville ties. Former resident Margaret Qualley, daughter of Andie MacDowell, has a substantial supporting role as Pussycat, a member of the Manson Family. Fellow local Perla Haney-Jardine, who previously worked with Tarantino on Kill Bill: Vol. 2, also makes a brief appearance as a hippie who sells stuntman Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) a drug-laced cigarette. The film is currently playing at the Fine Arts Theatre. fineartstheatre.com

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About Edwin Arnaudin
Edwin Arnaudin is a staff writer for Mountain Xpress. He also reviews films for ashevillemovies.com and is a member of the Southeastern Film Critics Association (SEFCA) and North Carolina Film Critics Association (NCFCA). Follow me @EdwinArnaudin

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