WORLD OF FACTS
dir. Mike Gibbiser, 2019
97 mins. United States.
In English.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 9 - 3 PM
ONE SCREENING ONLY!

After an accident no one could have expected, Maureen (Gretchen Akers) must return toher hometown so that her partner, Ted (Alex Stein), can receive medical care under the supervision of his family. Meanwhile, a long-term illness forces Maureen and her father, Peter (Bryan Saner), into mirrored positions of caretaker, watching over an unconscious spouse in differing degrees of comfort and confidence. Once home, Maureen and her sister Louise (Rebecca Spence) reorient themselves to the new routines and the challenges of holding bedside vigil amid a cluster of beeping machines, trapped in that purgatory particular to hospital visitors.

WORLD OF FACTS explores the inherent tension between hyper-intimacy and minimalist observation, and manufactures through formal means the experiences of its characters. The film explores both the vulnerability and strength of a family’s most profound, yet most common, experience. Borrowing its name from a passage in Paul Auster’s memoir about his father’s death—”I have entered the world of facts, the realm of brute particulars”—the film focuses its attention on the closely observed details of the everyday, which pervade the time-out-of-time experience of modern mourning and of grieving for things yet to come.

In collaboration with filmmakers Christopher Jason Bell (who we feted with a near-complete retrospective in 2018) and Brandon Colvin (A DIM VALLEY), Spectacle is proud to host Hidden Visions: Snapshots of Contemporary Independent Cinema. It’s the first of its kind - a weekend-long festival celebrating long-and-short form works outside the increasingly mainstream festival food chain. In keeping with our screenings of GO DOWN DEATH, VIDEOFILIA and A BREAD FACTORY, these are uncompromising slices of low-to-no-budget cinema from over a dozen filmmakers (NYC-based or otherwise) guaranteed to shake the dust off your resting notions of “indie film”.