“I’ve never seen anything like it. Highly original. Beautiful and mysterious southern-gothic avant-garde.”
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Festivalgoer
“General Orders No. 9 speaks for itself. Perfectly orchestrated, there is no other film like this one. Beautiful, original, contemplative, stunning, resonant and the list could go on.”
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Rachel Morgan, Sidewalk Moving Picture festival
“a great personal discovery”
A movie I recently programmed that I consider to be a great personal discovery: General Orders No. 9, though we weren’t the first festival to program it. Kyle (McKinnon, my programming partner) and I actually caught a screening of it at the 2009 Atlanta Film Festival and were both all like “what an amazing film, too bad we can’t program it in Birmingham”, as it is certainly not an easy film by any stretch. But it stuck with us and I/we eventually got to a place where I/we couldn’t imagine not programming it. I love how meditative the film is. I think it’s a true work of art. For me it serves as a love letter and a note of apology to what is lost and will never be recovered and that is intensely sad. It’s not a film that is very kind to humans and I suppose it makes sense why some people are so put off by it. I think it’s a really important experimental documentary and certainly a truly Southern work that can have quite a bit of difficulty in regards to interpretation. While it certainly has its influences, as a whole, I’ve really never seen anything quite like it. A great film and one that Kyle and I were very proud to bring to Birmingham and see screen in the extremely beautiful historic Alabama Theatre.