#sundance film review ponyboi

[thequeereview]

Sundance 2024 Film Review: Ponyboi ★★★★

Director Esteban Arango returns to Sundance with his riveting, stylish, and kinetic sophomore feature Ponyboi, which just received its world premiere in the US Dramatic Competition at the 40th edition of the festival. Written, produced by, and starring queer intersex nonbinary Latinx model, actor, and activist River Gallo, the seeds of the film began in an NYU stage production, before becoming a…

[qnewsau]

Ponyboi premieres at New Farm Queer Film Festival

New Post has been published on https://qnews.com.au/ponyboi-premieres-at-new-farm-queer-film-festival/

Ponyboi premieres at New Farm Queer Film Festival

Genre-bending crime thriller Ponyboi has been announced for the closing night of the New Farm Queer Film Festival next month.

Next month, the annual New Farm Queer Film Festival is back for a third year. It runs for eleven days from October 3 to 13 at New Farm Cinemas.

The entire lineup of the 2024 festival, with local premieres and restored classics.

Closing the festival is the highly-anticipated thriller Ponyboi, starring intersex actor River Gallo as well as Dylan O’Brien and out Aussie actor Murray Bartlett.

The Salvadoran-American River Gallo wrote and stars in the film. Ponyboi is based on an earlier short film of the same name from 2019.

Ponyboi is an intersex sex worker hustling to survive in New Jersey while working at a laundromat with his pregnant best friend, Angel.

Ponyboi’s nights are spent with his secret lover and pimp, Vinnie (Dylan O’Brien), who’s also the father of Angel’s child.

Over the course of 24 hours on Valentine’s Day in the early 2000s, Ponyboi must run from the mob after a drug deal goes sideways, forcing him to confront his past.

Ponyboi premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival to great reviews earlier in the year. The film will make its Australian premiere at the New Farm Queer Film Festival on October 13.

Watch River, Dylan and Ponyboi director Esteban Arango talk about the film below:

For the latest LGBTIQA+ Sister Girl and Brother Boy news, entertainment, community stories in Australia, visit qnews.com.au. Check out our latest magazines or find us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.

[nerdlifeisbetterthanreallife]

#30DaysofPride: Day 29-River Gallo

River Gallo is an intersex rights activist, filmmaker, writer, actor, and model. Their film Ponyboi, premiered at Sundance Film Festival to rave reviews. The film's director was nominated for a Grand Jury Prize. I'm excited to share their story with you!

Today’s #30DaysofPride is intersex rights activist, filmmaker, model, and actor River Gallo! Meet River, born in 1990, they were assigned male at birth but at the onset of puberty, their doctor told them their testicles were absent at birth. My family and I sat motionlessly on pleather chairs in the waiting room. It was a strange gathering — I was the only kid who had an appointment, so I didn’t…

[ecsundance]

Back in Florida, having had time to thaw out from our time in Utah, it is time to recollect on my 2024 Sundance experience. This was my second Sundance but it was my first time being able to go in person since the 2022 Sundance was virtual. While that was an unique experience with the virtual spaceship and karaoke, it was a much different experience being there in real life with face to face interactions with other festival attendees. In Michael Newland’s book Indie: An American Film Culture he says “The discourse of independent cinema moves through various institutional channels to form a set of common conceptual frames shared among filmmakers and support personnel, distributors and marketers, cultural gatekeepers such as film festival programmers, tastemakers including journalists and scholars, and many ordinary filmgoers. This makes a community of the different persons and groups for whom indie is a meaningful concept; they form this community around their investment in ideas of what indie is and is not.” I think this best describes how it feels to be at Sundance. Everyone there has either already seen what you have or is about to. This allows you to connect with different people in the lines with you or on the same shuttle. In my review of Sundance from 2022, I talked about how virtual screenings are here to say and that if Sundance couldn’t accept that, they would be left behind. I am glad to say that they heed my warnings because while they did promote in  person screenings by not having certain films be available, they still offered online screenings for many films and all of the shorts.

Justin’s Sundance Screenings:

Feature Films:

Freaky Tales

A Different Man

Kidnapping Inc.

I Saw the TV Glow

Ponyboi

Love Me

Little Death

A New Kind of Wilderness

As We Speak

Handling the Undead

The Greatest Night in Pop

Short Films:

Lea Tupu’anga / Mother Tongue

Merman

Pasture Prime

The Lost Season

Thirstygirl

Indie Episodic/New Frontier Projects:

Lolla: The Story of Lollapalooza

Eno

Talks:

Mental Health in Film: Using Narrative Film to Impact Mental Health in Underserved Communities

Feature Films:

My favorite film from all of Sundance was Exhibiting Forgiveness which I saw online since I wasn’t able to get in person tickets. This film really impacted me in the way that it dealt with generational trauma in a black family which is a topic that I am very interested in exploring with my own films. My least favorite film from the festival was Handling the Undead because it seemed like it was supposed to be a horror film because it was about the undead but there was little to no action and it just felt so anticlimactic due to its slow pace. Another film that I watched was Freaky Tales which had a lot of traction due to its star-studded cast and I liked the way that the film seemed to take inspiration from Quentin Tarantino’s film Kill Bill despite not really liking the ways that they tried linking the stories together. A Different Man was interesting because it talked about type casting and exploitation but I felt that it failed to do what it was supposed to. Kidnapping Inc was one of my top five films that I saw at Sundance because while it did have many jokes and funny dialogue it didn’t take away from the real world problems of kidnappings in Haiti. I had high hopes for I Saw the The TV Glow since it was associated with the production company A24 but it let me down in the fact that it felt like it couldn’t choose between Thriller or Fantasy so it just felt sort of lackluster in both genres. Ponyboi was interesting in its focus on intersex people and Love Me intrigued me in the way that it used different mediums to get its message across but also in the story that I felt was similar to the Disney Pixar movie Wall-E. I felt that Little Death was unique in its own way in that it portrayed the characters and how they changed physically or emotionally based on what they were talking about or dealing with. A New Kind of Wilderness was a film that really pulled at my heartstrings in the way the story was told, the film was edited, and the shots were filmed making for a very emotional piece. As We Speak was my favorite documentary without a doubt due to its incorporation of narrative aspects in it that created for a really interesting and engaging story. The Greatest Night in Pop was a good documentary and I liked the backstory about a song that I grew up listening to but for me personally I didn’t like it because it didn’t really have any conflicts in it.

Short Films:

Mother Tongue was probably my most anticipated and I am glad to say that it did not disappoint me due to its great dialogue writing and story. Pasture Prime and Thirstygirl both had really interesting stories that I could enjoy but The Lost Season did not keep my attention at all and I am sad to admit that I fell asleep through it. Merman was in between for me because while I did think the subject was interesting I personally didn’t relate to it and I think that’s part of the reason why I didn’t like it as much as the others.

Episodic/New Frontier/ Talks:

Lolla was the only episodic that I watched and I felt so disconnected from it that I fell asleep during it (to be fair it was late at night) and we left before the second episode. Eno was really good and I found it interesting in how each showing of the film would be different due to the use of ai changing the editing of it everytime. The mental health talk that I attended was really insightful and helped me to curate my voice for my short films.

-Justin Hollis