Tribeca Film Festival 2010 Preview: Lee Isaac Chung’s Lucky Life

Welcome back to our Tribeca 2010 Film Festival preview series. Over the next couple weeks, we’ll be featuring a providing trailers and film descriptions, for many of the films that Rudie Obias will be seeing while at the Film Festival. We’ll try to feature smaller, independent films that may not be receiving as much media attention as say, the next Shrek film which also happens to be premiering at Tribeca. Tonight we’re highlighting Lee Isaac Chung’s film, Lucky Life.

Lucky Life will be screening on   April 23rd, 28th, and 30th. For complete times and locations, visit the Tribeca Film Festival website. You can also visit the film’s website, or become a fan of the film on Facebook.

Again, be sure to follow Rudie on Twitter, to stay up to date as to what he’s watching, and what it’s like to attend the Tribeca Film Festival. If you know of, or represent any independent films that you’d like to see highlighted in this series, get in touch with us, we are looking forward to showcasing lots of unknown films.

Every year, Jason, Alex, and newly married Mark and Karen leave New York for a North Carolina beach house to reconnect and relax. But this year is different: Jason has been diagnosed with an aggressive terminal cancer, repurposing their trip as a meaningful’”yet uncertain’”farewell. Sharing laughter and camaraderie in even the most quotidian activities, the friends struggle to conceal their grief and use their disillusionment as an affirmative force. Some time later, as Mark and Karen prepare for the birth of their first child, memories of Jason seep into their new phase of life.

Inspired by the poetry of Gerald Stern, a onetime poet laureate from New Jersey, Lee Isaac Chung’s follow-up to the acclaimed Munyurangabo is a sharply observed, soft-spoken rumination on companionship, memory, life, and loss. Steeping the film in woeful hues leavened in baths of light, through wide angels and even archival footage, cinematographers Jenny Lund and Koji Otsuka poignantly capture the ephemeral quality of a moment in progress, and the life that happens in between.

–Roya Rastegar