Dream Team
Retro-Futurism: The Films of Lev Kalman & Whitney Horn
•
1h 32m
Directed by Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn | 93 mins | 2024
Making films together since 2004, Kalman and Horn have developed and refined a style that’s entirely their own, an idiosyncratic blend of ethereal synth-scored reverie, deadpan absurdist humor, sly sociopolitical observation, and genre-bending play. Their latest is an outrageous, visually sumptuous, more than slightly surreal homage to the ’90s late-night cable erotic thriller—structured as seven “episodes,” with individual credit sequences and titles like “Asses to Ashes"—starring Esther Garrel and Alex Zhang Hungtai as two INTERPOL agents tasked with investigating a mysterious death in Mexico who find themselves contending with fitness freak interns, sultry scientists, a psychic network of coral reefs, and their own smoldering desires. An oddball oneiric delight.
Up Next in Retro-Futurism: The Films of Lev Kalman & Whitney Horn
-
Two Plains & a Fancy
Directed by Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn | 89 mins | 2018
A dandy, a mystic, and a geologist adrift in the Colorado desert: here Kalman and Horn take what sounds like it could be a set-up for a joke and turn it into a wry and layered period piece. Urbanites set out for unfamiliar territory in sear... -
Fun's Over
Directed by Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn | 6 mins | 2006
News of a gonorrhea infection only briefly sours the mood in this early Kalman and Horn short, which telegraphs a cheerful and occasionally violent beach party set in a winkingly lo-fi future. -
Jazz Christmas
Directed by Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn | 9 mins | 2007
The decadent gathering of this early Kalman and Horn short does not take place on Christmas but rather New Year's Eve, 1927, nor does it feature any jazz proper—but it does have characters performing a riff on The Strokes’ “New York City Cop...
