Wendy and Lucy + Ryan

Wendy and Lucy 
USA 2008. Director: Kelly Reichardt
Cast: Michelle Williams, Will Patton, Walter Dalton, Larry Fessenden, Will Oldham

A modest, quietly moving drama, Wendy and Lucy, the second feature by writer-director Kelly Reichardt (Old Joy), has been the standard bearer for a heartening new wave of naturalism — a “neo-neorealism” — in American independent cinema. Michelle Williams, in her finest performance, is Wendy, a young drifter stranded in a small Oregon town after her battered old car breaks down and her beloved dog Lucy goes missing. The plot of this unadorned, unsentimental, unhurried work, adapted (like Old Joy) from a short story by Jon Raymond, is deceptively simple; Wendy and Lucy, in its understated way, has much to say about loneliness, hard economic times, compassion in a culture of individualism, the current American zeitgeist. “Such is the resonant magic of Reichardt’s remarkable little film . . . [that] every word matters, every shot counts, until the kernel expands and a whole world emerges” (Rick Groen, Globe and Mail). “Wendy and Lucy establishes Reichardt, beyond question, as one of the few masters now working in American independent film” (Larry Gross, Film Comment). “A lucid and melancholy inquiry into the current state of American society . . . Reichardt [is] quietly establishing herself as an indispensable American filmmaker” (A. O. Scott, New York Times). Colour, 35mm. 80 mins.

Ryan
Canada 2004. Director: Chris Landreth

One of the most acclaimed Canadian films of the decade, Chris Landreth’s mind-blowing, moving short, a triumph of 3-D computer-generated animation, won an array of richly deserved honours, including a Genie, an Oscar, and three prizes at Cannes. Ryan profiles the tragic figure of Ryan Larkin, once one of Canadian’s most acclaimed animators (an Oscar nominee himself in the 1960s), who wound up living on welfare and panhandling in Montreal. Larkin died in 2007, but the wide success of this 2004 film helped get him off the streets and back in the studio. Colour, 35mm. 14 mins.