We’ve been hearing raves about A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night since its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival back in January. And now first-time filmmaker Ana Lily Amirpour, who was nominated for the Gotham Awards’ Breakthrough Director prize for her “Iranian vampire Western” debut, can finally boast a trailer and a release date for her festival darling.
Amirpour wrote and directed A Girl, which features a female vampire in a floor-length, cape-like hijab that trails the central character as she haunts an abandoned town. The official synopsis is below, but the film appears to rely less on narrative than its arresting black-and-white images, evocative and allusive soundtrack, and creepy, romantic, violent, and gloriously monstrous atmospherics:
“Strange things are afoot in Bad City. The Iranian ghost town, home to prostitutes, junkies, pimps and other sordid souls, is a bastion of depravity and hopelessness where a lonely vampire stalks its most unsavory inhabitants.
Cinema’s first Iranian vampire western, Ana Lily Amirpour’s debut feature basks in the sheer pleasure of pulp. A joyful mash-up of genre, archetype, and iconography, its prolific influences span spaghetti westerns, graphic novels, horror films, and the Iranian New Wave. Amped by a mix of Iranian rock, techno, and Morricone-inspired riffs, its airy, anamorphic, black-and-white aesthetic and artfully drawn-out scenes combine the simmering tension of Sergio Leone with the weird surrealism of David Lynch.”
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night opens November 21.
http://v.indiewire.com/videos/indiewire/AGWHAAN_1minTrailer_v15.3_mixed.mp4