With just a few films under his belt, Louisiana-born director John Maringouin has developed a shape-shifting and immersive style, deceptively frenetic in both form and content, to take an interest in the people on the flipside of the American Dream.

His debut film, Running Stumbled, brings the director back to his hometown, conjuring an emotionally raw family melodrama between himself and his father, Johnny Roe, an artist and substance abuser with a violent streak. Seeing each other for the first time since Roe threatened to kill Maringouin during his childhood, the film takes unexpected and profound turns by using solarized and otherwise colored DV images to accelerate the claustrophobia of family life under addiction and American poverty.

Ghostbox Cowboy takes this dichotomy a step further, officially being labeled as Maringouin’s fiction feature debut. Here, the director dresses his two main actors, David Zellner and Robert Longstreet, in quasi cowboy drag to push them to the heart of China’s tech industry in pursuit of riches. While the story is scripted, the film immerses us into a real, absurd world, filled with characters who are evidently playing variations of themselves.

Together, these two films show a filmmaker warping the elasticity of cinema to craft rousing explorations of places, authentic and imagined, and the offbeat people that inhabit them.

Tathagat Prakash

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