Jess + Moss

EXCLUSIVE FIRST RUN! ► “Evoking memories of moody American indies like David Gordon Green’s George Washington, Clay Jeter’s debut feature is a visually arresting and achingly melancholic tone poem. Jess, an 18-year-old girl, and Moss, a 12-year-old boy, while away the final days of summer on a picturesque Kentucky tobacco farm. Heartbreakingly reliant on one another, the second cousins seem to exist in a world of their own. Poking around a rotting farmhouse teeming with domestic debris (a gloriously surreal sight to behold), lighting off fireworks and lounging atop silos, they find themselves falling into the same conversations time and again (which only furthers the narrative's hypnotic lure). Amidst the ennui, a sexual undercurrent pulses. Working with more than 30 different film stocks (some of them two decades old) and shooting on his family farm, Jeter cobbles together evocative scenes that unfold like fragments of faded memories. Possessing an enthralling fragility, Jess + Moss feels like it could disintegrate before your very eyes at any given moment. Consequently, every second spent with it becomes all the more precious” (Vancouver I.F.F.). “An art cinema gem ... Jeter's film takes on the quality of a sustained dream, as if the theatrical conceits of Jean Genet were married to a children's story retold via William Faulkner’s Southern brand of stream of consciousness” (Robert Koehler, Variety). Colour, Blu-Ray. 83 mins.