Apart From That

United States

2006

120 Min

Color

English

Currently 4.2/5 Stars.
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DIR Jennifer Shainin, Randy Walker

CAST Susan Alotrico, Tony Cladoosby, Kyle Conyers, Kathleen McNearney, Alice Ellingson, Toan Le, Jessica Marlowe-Goldstein

Synopsis

Wandering a sort of Bizarro-world contemporary heartland sans Wal-Marts, where the lozenge shaped Ford Taurus never quite crowded out angular Olds Toronados and Buick Centurys, the many characters of “Apart From That” find themselves lost among domestic banalities that have made them strangers in a strange land. So people have a tendency to find themselves at the wrong doorstep here.

Intercutting storylines that speak to one another without quite rubbing shoulders, writer/directors Randy Walker and Jennifer Shainin eloquently sustain a sort of mystery that found snapshots produce so effortlessly, to capture their remarkably assured cast of newcomers in moments of poetically unguarded naturalism. Whether prank calling the fire department or overemphatically rehearsing an intervention, these people can’t stop recording, mapping, and memorializing the present, as if to soothe a possibly nonexistent past that itches like a phantom limb.
–Spencer Parsons, SXSW

The everyday mysteries of ordinary folk in a rural Washington State town form the substance of "Apart From That”…The American theme of lives lived in quiet desperation is sensitively applied through each of the film’s elegantly woven strands, all reaching a satisfying end without feeling neatly resolved.
-Robert Koehler, Variety

Director

Jennifer Shainin

Jennifer Shainin has woven a pillow made entirely of U.S. postage stamps and she likes talking about giant penguins in Antarctica that stand six feet tall. She also has a way of winking at you that makes you smile even if you’re trying not to. She got her undergraduate degree at Rhode Island School of Design, worked on the main titles for many Hollywood films including SEVEN, BIODOME, TWISTER and MISSION:IMPOSSIBLE, picked up her Master’s degree at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, during which time she wrote, produced and directed her own narrative short film entitled WHERE I AM. After school, she then picked up her suitcases and left Los Angeles altogether, opting instead for the Pacific Northwest. Apparently, that’s where she grew up, doing the graveyard shift on a pea combine when she was just a kid, telling her first stories into a CB radio while sitting under the Northern Lights.

Randy Walker

After a failed tennis career, Randy Walker became a journalist and did political cartoons for small weekly newspapers in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, including the rag that once staffed Mark Twain. Eventually, Walker got in the habit of using the press cameras to take subversive pictures of Costco sample ladies or Elks Club Republicans. He also worked in a genetics lab for the University of California, Riverside, sequencing the DNA of marsupials from New Guinea. Couldn’t hold down that gig, either. As a result, he tried his hand at staple pulling, letterman’s jacket design and dishwashing in Scotland…but none of it would take. Got to the point where reading poetry in jail sounded pretty good, so he set out to steal a book on ethics from a bookstore. Of course, this plan, like so many earlier plans of his, never saw the light of day. Oh, and he was on a children’s game show called FUN HOUSE when he was eleven.