This year, the fall festival season will see two filmmakers who have long been away from the feature filmmaking game, return in a big way. Barry Jenkins will hit pretty much every stop in the next six to eight weeks with “Moonlight,” while “Jesus’ Son” director Alison Maclean will land at TIFF and NYFF with her latest, “The Rehearsal.”
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Having premiered already at the New Zealand International Film Festival this summer, the Maclean’s latest is based on the novel by Eleanor Cratton, and stars Kerry Fox, James Rolleston, Alice Englert, Ella Edward, Kieran Charnock, Michelle Ny, Scotty Cotter, and Marlon Williams in the story that’s set against the backdrop of a drama school, where romance, art, and scandal collide. Here’s the synopsis provided by TIFF:
When young Stanley (James Rolleston) auditions for drama school, he has only a faint idea of what he’s in for. He quickly makes friends with many in his class, especially his roommate, the clownish William. Stanley is not quite prepared for the emotional rigour and pressure of some of his classes, particularly those taught by the institute head, Hannah. She is a force of nature, played to the hilt in a crackerjack performance by Kerry Fox: commanding and charismatic, but with questionable ethics around how far to push her students. And she’s pushing some of them close to the breaking point.
In the meantime, though, Stanley has met a girl. He likes her a lot, and his affection is not diminished by the television news broadcast that reveals her family to be going through a steamy scandal. But when his classmates suggest that their final-year group project be a dramatization of that same scandal — and that Stanley’s relationship with her could provide access to prime dramatic material — he starts to feel a moral pinch.
The lives of these students and their surrounding community become bound up together, and then come apart. But how exactly that transpires is something best left for the viewer to discover, as the pieces of this immaculately constructed puzzle fall quietly into place until the entire picture is clear.
There’s no U.S. distribution yet for “The Rehearsal,” but it will definitely be a title with many eyes on it.
