God Bless Sam Neave

God bless Sam Neave for 3 reasons:

1) Making another feature film
2) Making it another New York City DV film
3) Using nearly the same cast from his previous film

Neave gave us Cry Funny Happy (which we blogged about here not long ago) in 2003 after it premiered at the Sundance film festival; the low budget film was bittersweet, surprising, and honest. Its one of the most cherished DVDs in my personal collection. Here, his latest installment after a long time between features, is First Person Singular.

Seth Farber returns to New York City from his native South Africa where he has just buried his wife. A fiction writer whose first collection of short stories brought him acclaim years ago, Seth is struggling with his long-overdue first novel. In the days immediately following his return, Seth has to come to terms with his new life and face the consequences of the one left behind.

Here's an excerpt from Neave's director's statement:

"I have long believed that a film should be about something although it’s not always immediately clear to me what that something is until I begin the process in earnest.

With First Person Singular, as with Cry Funny Happy, I wanted to begin with character rather than plot. I knew that I wanted to work with Darrill but that was really all. About six months before filming began, we started to meet regularly and exchange books, films, articles and music that we found interesting. I would tell him some of my ideas for the film and then change them all again the next week. But slowly some patterns did begin to emerge: we found that we were discovering similar themes in various arenas.

Whether it was because we were looking for it or that it really was there I couldn’t say for sure, but every where we turned we came upon examinations of grieving – both personal and collective. From Joan Didion (The Year of Magical Thinking) to Arvo Pärt (Lamentate) to Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Distant and Climates) there was this common strand of loss and its impact on those left behind.

It was out of this atmosphere that Seth Farber finally emerged - a lonely, distant figure in the grieving landscape of New York City in 2007. Darrill and I are both immigrants to this town – I think we have both been here for about nine years now – and we immediately started to seize upon Seth as someone through whom we could relate our growing feelings of isolation, disconnection and loss."
Read the rest here at the film's site: http://www.fpsfilm.com/

FPS will have its US Premiere at the2009 Cinequest Film Festival in San Jose(Feb 25 - Mar 09).
Check http://www.cinequest.org/ for more details.

Here is the trailer:


First Person Singular-TRAILER from sam neave on Vimeo.