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SFFILM Festival

The Fixer

Directed by Ian Olds

USA | 108

24 Apr
Sun, Apr 24, 2016 at 8:30 pm PT

Description

Director Ian Olds’s fiction feature debut is a captivating tale set in the wildest back roads of Sonoma County, a place he richly renders as both a place of menacing secrets and an oddball paradise. After fleeing his home in Afghanistan, military interpreter and budding reporter Osman (A Girl Who Walks Alone at Night‘s Dominic Rains) finds himself unceremoniously plunked down amidst bohemian spirit-seekers and low-rent criminals when he’s taken in by Gloria (Melissa Leo), the local sheriff and mother of a wartime journalist friend. When Osman accompanies her on a domestic disturbance call, he comes face to fist with the charismatic yet vaguely sinister Lindsay (a nearly unrecognizable, long-haired James Franco). Against her warnings, the two strike up a tentative, unlikely friendship—until Lindsay goes missing and a backwoods gangster turns up dead. Unpredictable, ominous, yet surprisingly funny, The Fixer deftly weaves disparate tones to create a vivid, lived-in portrait of a California rarely seen in film. Supported through multiple funding rounds of SFFS/KRF grants, Olds’s film is perhaps the most anticipated Bay Area film of the year. —Michelle Devereaux

Director Ian Olds

Noted documentarian and editor Ian Olds won an Independent Spirit Award for his acclaimed 2005 documentary Occupation: Dreamland. His Emmy-nominated 2009 documentary Fixer: The Taking of Ajmal Naqshbandi (2009), which explores the kidnapping of an Afghan translator, earned him the Best New Documentary Filmmaker prize at the Tribeca Film Festival. In 2012, he co-wrote and co-directed Francophilia, an experimental documentary that utilizes footage from frequent collaborator James Franco’s stint on daytime drama General Hospital. The Fixer is Olds’s first fiction feature.

Film Details

Language English

Year 2016

Runtime 108

Country USA

Director Ian Olds

Producer Caroline von Kuhn, Jennifer Glynn

Writer Paul Felten, Ian Olds

Editor Scott Cummings, Joe Murphy, Ian Olds

Cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra

Music Jim McHugh

Cast Dominic Rains, Melissa Leo, James Franco, Rachel Brosnahan