Zucchini

Miles Emanuel is a New York-based filmmaker and actor. He co-starred in Owen Kline's Funny Pages, which premiered in the Quinzaine des réalisateurs at Cannes in 2022. He has seen over ten thousand movies; this is his first.

A word from the selection committee : 
Lukas, a young, nerdy cinephile, is shooting his first film and to do so, takes along his two friends Willa and Fletcher (Clara Barnstone and Matilda Fleming, whom we have seen in Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point by Tyler Taormina) in a hallucinatory and slightly off-kilter DIY road trip between Austin and New Orleans. Zucchini, is a film of obsessions. Lukas’ bulimic obsession with cinema – whom we can easily imagine a slightly ridiculous fictional double of the filmmaker himself, here signing his first feature film. Obsession with an image; a pan between a helicopter and a saxophone player in a 1987 Hungarian film (Season of Monsters by Miklós Jancsó). Obsession with an aesthetic: slightly camp 1980s visuals, with orange halos and a hazy Lynchian synthesiser soundscape. And obsession with a gesture: can feet convey as much emotion as faces on screen? For Lukas, and despite his two friends’ better judgement, it is self-evident: “We must tell the whole story, so we must tell the whole body” – including the feet. And, along the way, as he searches for his own film aspirations, Miles Emanuel finds his: a kind of cinema capable of summoning raw emotion from a simple panoramic shot – from head to toe. 

Rose Hirgorom