Rosehill opens the Fall 2015 New Jersey Film Festival!

Here is the first of a two part interview I did with Rosehill Director Brigitta Wagner:

Nigrin: Rosehill is an intimate and beautiful feature film about that delves into the lives of two women. After receiving some devastating news from her doctor, Katriona escapes New York to visit her best friend, who works as a sex researcher at Indiana University. When the two women decide to embark on a road trip through mid-western America, they find out more about one another, and more about the resilience of the human spirit, than they could have predicted. I just watched your film again and it is was just as wonderful the second time. Tell us why you made this film.

Wagner: Rosehill is a love-letter to friendship and the process of aging and evolving. In my early thirties, I was struck by how volatile, exciting, and unexpected that moment and those experiences were. Friends were dealing with big transitions in their careers, geographies, love lives, families, and health: marriage, divorce, birth, death, new responsibilities, opportunities, and failures. Suddenly we were these fallible beings—no longer fully in control of our destinies—as young people tend to feel in their 20s and earlier. We grew up in a country that offered a lot of certainty and security, a pathway to upward mobility, and a political and cultural sense of cohesion and shared imperatives. You try to get educated. You try to get a job. And then you participate in something called the American Dream. But we entered adulthood in a political and technological moment that disrupted these familiar pathways and assumptions. On a wider scale I could observe a new uncertainty at work in the American Midwest after the Great Recession. As a professor in Indiana, I was fascinated by the stories of the people around me—all these people from all over the world who had found their way to the small college town of Bloomington and all the families who had been there for generations. And I wanted to think in broader terms about how individual stories relate to larger narratives of place. And Southern Indiana happens to have both a geological history that is particularly important for the history of American cities and a history of sex research that laid the groundwork for the sea changes in civil liberties that are shaping the US today. The fictional characters Alice and Katriona, while concerned with their own obstacles and challenges, become embedded in a larger story of place and longing, of past and present. I made the film in order to explore the idea of “coming-of-age” as an ongoing emotional and geological process.

Nigrin: Some of the Festival judges commented on how the liked the fact that you wove together experimental scenes within the narrative. Tell us more about this and how you decided to put the film together this way.

Wagner: Since the very first treatment of the film, I had been planning to weave together these various elements and to use different cameras, aspect ratios, and image textures. I liked the idea of having different registers for conveying the relationship of Alice and Katriona, of Indiana and New York, of the present and past, of sexual practices and geological processes. Just as we humans communicate to each other with words and body language (and therefore have the power to convey nuanced and mixed emotions), I liked the idea of the film doing something similar to its audience: playing with trust and intimacy, hiding and revealing, declaring and denying, inviting and resisting. When people open themselves to this film, they might have an experience that’s more like a meandering river. From a distance, they understand that it’s a river flowing in a particular direction. But in the river, they are at the mercy of all kinds of micro-forces and movements, and it’s a very unique emotional journey that keeps a lot of possibilities open—like life.

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Rosehill will be screened with a great short film The Cart on Friday, September 11. Here is more info on this program:

The Cart - Patrik Eriksson (Lodz, Poland) In this hauntingly beautiful experimental film, a young woman fulfills a mysterious task, as she moves through an existential dreamscape. 2015; 7 min.

Rosehill - Brigitta Wagner (Haworth, New Jersey) Expertly weaving together improvised and scripted scenes, Rosehill is an intimate feature film that delves into the lives of two women. After receiving some devastating news from her boyfriend, Katriona escapes New York to visit her best friend, who works as a sex researcher at Indiana University. When the two women decide to embark on a road trip through mid-western America, they find out more about one another, and more about the resilience of the human spirit, than they could have predicted. 2015;
78 min. With an introduction and Q+A session with Director Brigitta Wagner!

Friday, September 11, 2015 at 7:00 p.m.

Voorhees Hall #105/Rutgers University

71 Hamilton Street, New Brunswick, New Jersey

$10=General; $9=Students+Seniors; $8=Rutgers Film Co-op Friends

Information: (848) 932-8482; www.njfilmfest.com

Free Food courtesy of Jimmy Johns of New Brunswick will be given out prior to this screening of the New Jersey Film Festival!