THE WORLD IS FULL OF SECRETS
dir. Graham Swon, 2018
USA. 98 min.
FRIDAY, MAY 23 – 7:30 PM (Q&A ONE NIGHT ONLY)
Almost a zelig-like figure of the New York film scene, Graham Swon is best known as a producer on some of the best and most truly independent American films of the past decade. As if helping create the films of Ted Fendt, Ricky D’Amrbose, Matías Piñeiro, and Dan Sallitt weren’t enough, Swon is also a startlingly innovative filmmaker in his own right whose first two films, THE WORLD IS FULL OF SECRETS (2018) and AN EVENING SONG (for three voices) (2024), display an impressive penchant for visual experimentation, narrative game-playing, and a transcendental attention to the passage of time and memory. In honor of the release of AN EVENING SONG in New York and Los Angeles, we’ll be hosting Swon to present a special screening of his first film THE WORLD IS FULL OF SECRETS.
Set over one night at a girls’ high school slumber party where five friends hold a scary story contest, SECRETS is an heir to storytelling anthologies like Boccaccio’s Decamaron, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, or EC Comics’ Tales from the Crypt. Filled with sumptuous dissolves, a mysterious narrator, and durationally long shots that stretch beyond 20 minutes, it’s also a rich aesthetic experience aided by cinematographer Barton Cortright. Both nostalgic of teenage innocence and filled with the macabre, SECRETS is a unique and unsettling evocation of the precariousness of suburban childhood explored through American oral traditions.
“This non-gory horrific tale without monsters or bloodshed is probably the most poisonous and scary US film produced in recent years. Inspired by Southern Gothic’s dark romanticism, shot with acute minimalism, this film conjures up the best contemporary horror writers (such as Brian Evanson, Thomas Ligotti or Lisa Tuttle) with its hypnotic narration, its stylised grammar, both elegant and brutal, and its existential and metaphysical terror. In a gesture that reminds one of Warhol, Graham Swon prints on the young girls’ faces an ancestral violence inherent to the American culture, and puts the spectators in a torpor from which they will unheartedly depart.”
– Victor Bournérias