Mark Elijah Rosenberg is the Founder and Artistic Director of Rooftop Films; look for film reviews from him and the rest of the Rooftop crew throughout the week.
If you’re going to a bunch of SXSW films this year, you’ve probably seen David Lowery’s name in the credits a lot. Among other things, he edited It Was Great But I Was Ready to Come Home, worked on Beeswax, and was listed simply as “right hand man” on Alexander the Last.
At Rooftop, we screened David’s short film A Catalogue of Anticipations in 2008, at our “Surreal Sounds and Shorts” screening, co-presented with MoMA. The short is a strange and wistful fable with a little girl and a skeleton fairy, a unique film in tone, style, and subject matter — fairly different from the mumblecore films he’s collaborating on. So I was thrilled to see he had his debut feature here at SXSW, and my expectation has been rewarded. St. Nick is a stunning film, all the more resonant because it clearly comes from the same movement of realist movies here at SXSW, but has a distinct care for rich visuals and thought-provoking audio, qualities that are often lacking in these other films, which concentrate primarily on getting quotidian performances with a simple verite style.
