jonathanmoya1955

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Chattanooga Film Festival: Old Wounds: **The Body Remembers What the Heart Cannot Say**

In the tremor before a word is spoken, Old Wounds begins—shaky, intimate, already too close. The screen pulses with breath, not score. The light is soft with intent, like the hush before a wound reopens. Director Steven Hugh Nelson does not ask us to suspend disbelief—he quietly informs us we’re already inside the story, that belief is no longer a choice. His debut feature, co-written with his…

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Chattanooga Film Festival: Good Night:  Turns Chaos into Catharisis

When dusk swells over Buenos Aires and the pavement begins to sweat neon, Good Night unfurls like a whispered dare. Matías Szulanski’s urban nocturne doesn’t just walk you through the city—it hurtles you headlong into its waiting mouth. Here, the moon bears witness to impulsive crimes and fractured trust, and every alley glimmers with potential peril or escape. Laura steps off the bus carrying…

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Chattanooga Film Festival:  Alan at Night: **Where the Hours Drift Sideways**

In *Alan at Night*, Jesse Swenson paints with dusk. The world here tilts slightly between silence and hum, its colors bruised, its corners softened by longing. Alan moves through these hours with the weight of someone who once believed in direction. Now he follows routine the way others follow stars—hoping, not knowing, still moving. The film begins without fanfare, already in motion, as if we’ve…

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Chattanooga Film Festival: House of Ashes: A Haunting Allegory of Oppression and Survival

Izzy Lee’s *House of Ashes* (2025) is a deeply unsettling horror film that combines psychological terror with sharp social commentary. Premiering at the Etheria Film Festival, the film follows Mia (Fayna Sanchez), a woman coping with a miscarriage and the death of her husband, Adam. Although she has been acquitted of his murder, Mia is placed under house arrest in a dystopian America where…

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Chattanooga Film Festival: Itch: **The Burn Beneath the Skin**

In a corner-store cocoon carved from grief, Itch! writhes into life—a survival psalm in shades of grief and fluorescent doom. Bari Kang’s debut horror feature unfurls like skin under fingernails: tender, raw, and impossible to ignore. Jay—widower, drunk, father—staggers beneath the weight of sorrow’s shadow. His daughter Olivia, a light too bright for his hollowed shell, returns to his orbit as…

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EXCELLENT WRITINGS BY JONATHAN MOYA

BIO JONATHAN MOYA lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where he balances a lifelong love of poetry and storytelling with deep cinematic exploration. His …EXCELLENT WRITINGS BY JONATHAN MOYA

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Chattanooga Film Festival: Solvent: **The Skin Beneath the Screen**

Solvent does not begin. It ruptures. Like a fever breaking under pale light, like memory surfacing in static. From its first frame, the film unspools not in story but in sensation—choppy, quick-cut reveries that lacerate the eye and unsettle the breath. You do not watch Solvent so much as stagger through it, questioning what lingers in your periphery, what your gut insists you’ve just seen. It is…

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Chattanooga Film Festival: The Only Ones :**When the World Forgot, They Remembered**

In The Only Ones, director Jordan Miller distills horror into something intimate and aching—a kind of psychological erosion whispered through branches and gasoline haze. The terror here is not cosmic or conjured; it grows like mold in closed rooms, fed by silence, by second glances, by what was almost said. From the first frame, we are not watching a nightmare—we’re remembering one, detail by…

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Chattanooga Film Festival: Hacked: A Double Entendre of Rage Fueled Karma (2025) Review – A Darkly Comedic Revenge Fantasy

Shane Brady’s *Hacked: A Double Entendre of Rage Fueled Karma* (2025) is a genre-blending revenge thriller that turns digital theft into a blood-soaked, darkly comedic spectacle. Based on actual events, the film follows the Rumble family, whose dream of buying their first home is shattered when a notorious hacker known as *The Chameleon* (Chandler Riggs) steals their life savings. With no help…

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Chattanooga Film Festival: Dark My Night: **No Flame Without Ash**

Neal Dhand’s *Dark My Light* begins not with a shout, but with a shudder—a flicker, a breath, a figure pausing too long in a doorway. The film walks into the night backward, unsure whether it wants to remember or forget. What unfolds is less a story than a fevered tracing of absence, lit only by the dull glow of what refuses to die. Its light, as the title promises, isn’t kind. But it…

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The Wind that Speaks Between Us

The Wind that Speaks Between Us“The wind is a warning,” I tell the child.“No, it’s a game,” she says to me.I watch her chase the breeze barefoot across the hills.She laughs as its breath scatters the field to dandelion puffs.In the fluff, it whispers secrets only children can hear.She doesn’t see all the other things its gales carry away.It tumbles down her stick house under the oak’s shade.I…

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Chattanooga Film Festival: The Harbor Men:  A Haunting Exploration of Isolation and Fate

Casey T. Malone’s *The Harbor Men* (2025) is a moody and atmospheric film that combines psychological tension with existential dread. Set in a decaying coastal town, the story follows a group of men who gather at a mysterious harbor, each burdened by the weight of their past decisions. As the tides shift, so do their fates, leading to a slow unraveling of secrets, guilt, and the eerie forces that…

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Chattanooga Film Festival: They Were Witches: **The Wind Spoke Their Names**

They came from smoke and shadow, from soil that remembered too much. In *They Were Witches*, director Alejandro G. Alegre weaves silence into spellwork and grief into scripture. Tania Niebla stands at the film’s aching center, not as an oracle or martyr, but as a woman whose breath carries the weight of centuries. Her performance doesn’t beg for attention—it compels it, steady and…

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One Last Breeze

One Last Breeze It sneaks under the threshold of the long shut door,over the shedding skin of peeling wallpaper,past the dusty spines of now unread books—turning pages no one meant to leave,step less, voice less— a curious breeze.It seeks the crack in the window—to leave this vault of knowledge behind—these graves beyond, both named and unknown—all these heavy stones and plastic flowers in…

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Elio: To Be Believed By the Stars

Disney/Pixar Disney/Pixar Elio is not a film about first contact. It’s about first understanding—what it means to be seen, named, and misunderstood, and still to answer back. Directed with aching luminosity by Madeline Sharafian, Domee Shi, and Adrian Molina, this is Pixar at its most inward-looking, letting space be not only wide and strange, but personal, pulsing, alive with echoes of loss…

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Chattanooga Film Festival: I Really Love My Husband: A Honeymoon of Doubt and Self-Discovery

G.G. Hawkins’ *I Really Love My Husband* (2025) is a dramedy that delves into the complexities of love, self-deception, and the gradual unraveling of a marriage. The film follows Teresa (Madison Lanesey), a newlywed who frequently insists—perhaps too often—that she truly loves her husband, Drew (Travis Quentin Young). As the couple embarks on a long-overdue honeymoon in the picturesque Bocas del…

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 Chattanooga Film Festival: Abigail Before Beatrice:  All Roads Turn Back

Cassie Keet’s *Abigail Before Beatrice* hums beneath the skin like a memory that never quite settled. It opens not with a bang, but with a breath held too long—a dusty room, a girl staring at a letter she’s unsure she has the right to open. Abigail (Riley Dandy) doesn’t speak in declarations. She watches. She hesitates. The story rests in that pause, stretched between before and becoming. The…