Beast Beast

Nito, a teenager who loves skateboarding, is the new kid at a high school in the Southern United States. That’s where he meets Krista, a charismatic and outgoing student who needs inspiration to perform a play. Nito’s confident and determined, and he’s starting a new life in the neighborhood, making up for the absence of his parents with friends from the street. At the same time, Adam, a boy obsessed with firearms, realizes that his videos need more explicit content if he wants to be able to live off his own material.

 

Jim Cummings (Thunder Road), a well-known face of American indie cinema, took Danny Madden’s multi-award-winning short film Krista (2018) and turned it into the feature film Beast Beast. Here, Madden directs with great intention and energy an overwhelming reflection on growing up in a world full of insecurities, in a country where street violence can escalate rapidly, in a society marked by social media and self-image. The way in which the narration opens towards the viewers leads us to experience the unfolding drama from very close: we understand the events, since we have been in the shoes of all the characters. We are facing a triptych set in Donald Trump’s America where many people are forced to grow up too fast and where many others see their dreams prematurely broken.

You may also like

Life Itself

Life Itself Roger Ebert, most likely the most popular and influential film critic in the last decades of the 20th Century in the United States, passed away from a thyroid cancer in 2013. Ebert, who spent most of his life telling everyone what movies to...

Sylvio

Sylvio A resident of Baltimore, Sylvio Bernadi spends his weekdays inside a cubicle, working for a debt collection agency. Sylvio is also a human-like gorilla. In his free time, he likes to record episodes of “The Quiet Times With Herbert Herpels”, a puppet show where...

The Last Black Man in San Francisco

Jimmie Fails has a complicated life. His parents are drug-addicts and he has had his fair share of trouble with the law. Despite everything, he's proud of his city, San Francisco, and of the Victorian house that his grandfather built and that is now part...

Credits

Year: 2020
Runtime: 85′
Country: USA
Direction: Danny Madden
Screenplay: Danny Madden
Cast: Shirley Chen, Will Madden, José Ángeles
Cinematography: Kristian Zuniga
Genre: Drama
Subtitles: Zinebi, Pau Velasco Martínez
Contact: Vanishing Angle

Wins & Nominations

2020: Sundance Film Festival

2020: Atlanta Film Festival – Best Feature