Warm Blood

Skate filmmaker Rick Charnoski teams up with Australian filmmaker Amiel Courtin-Wilson for this penetrating, stylishly gritty story of a teenage vagabond on the fringes of 1980s California.

In an America haunted by the spectre of Reagan, emotionally distant teen runaway Red returns home to the desolate outskirts of Modesto, California. She’s recovering from a stint in a psych ward, and now she wants to track down her wayward father. In the process, she falls in – and drops out – with another drifter, Tom, and together they wander through a town turned toxic by poverty and industrial neglect.

Co-written by Australian avant-garde director Courtin-Wilson (The Silent Eye, MIFF 2017; Hail, MIFF 2012) – whose film Man on Earth also screens at this year’s MIFF – Warm Blood marks the feature debut of skater-turned-filmmaker Charnoski and his producer Coan “Buddy” Nichols (Deathbowl to Downtown, MIFF 2008). The pair began making DIY skate films in the late 90s before moving into documentary shorts and commercials, and shooting the dreamy super-8 sequences for Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park. Mixing cut-up, diaristic storytelling, documentary and impressionistic cinematography (courtesy of Kelly Reichardt’s regular DOP Christopher Blauvelt), Charnoski crafts a raw, evocative portrait of an underseen American underclass – at once scuzzy and subversive, tender and lyrical.

“Nobly transgressive … Feels like a lost piece of cinema from the No Wave era that reveled in the New York underground, only relocated to NorCal.” – The Moveable Fest

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Director Rick Charnoski and producer/writers Amiel Courtin-Wilson and James Hewison will introduce the film and participate in a Q&A following both screenings.