TRONA
A feature film by David Fenster
A young businessman, disillusioned with his life and bored by his surroundings, mysteriously finds himself in the desert. After making his way back to civilization, and encountering a handful of local personalities, the man decides to abandon his former life and reinvent himself as the owner of a junkyard in a ghost town. When his initial euphoria subsides, loneliness and boredom compel him to seek out company. In a nearby town he meets a waitress and her brother, who introduce him to a circle of desert misfits. A desperate night of excess with the group leaves the man faced with a choice between the desolate desert or the desolate city. Alternately introspective, vulgar and comedic, Trona draws inspiration from the landscape and the people of the Mojave Desert. Junkyards, motel rooms, dilapidated structures and abandoned landscapes are all characters in their own right, playing opposite the quiet, mustached protagonist.
"An evocation of the desolate road poetry remembered from the best films of Wim Wenders and Jim Jarmusch. Fenster seems to say that you can feel as alone in the city as you can in the desert, and he has a pretty original way of saying it."
-Scott Foundas, LA Weekly
"A striking feature debut by a filmmaker with a taste for moribund humor and the ironies of the American Dream. ...Although Fenster made "Trona" as his CalArts thesis pic, he shows a disciplined and experienced knack for cutting. Less attentive and impatient auds will read the general minimalist approach as mere nothingness, but that would be overlooking a keen artistic sensitivity to the story's extremely spacious place and a fun desire to link early silent comedy with modernist cinema."
-Robert Koehler, Variety
"David Fenster's Trona opens with a great little tightrope walk of a scene, involving a sexually frustrated business traveller and a hotel room with very thin walls, that any in-depth description of threatens to ruin. It's almost laugh-out-loud funny, yet unbearably tense, and in balancing honest pathos and introspection, and an interrogation of the kind of indie-film isolation that we're often asked to interpret as "meaningful", it sets a high standard for everything to follow. Luckily, the rest of the film is more than capable of keeping up."
-Karina Longworth, Cinematical
Starring David Nordstrom, Libby Hux, Lee Lynch
Writer, Director, Cinematographer: David Fenster
Music: Tatsuhiko Asano
Official Selection:
CineVegas
Los Angeles Film Festival
Viennale
Buenos Aires Film Festival
MOMA
$15
DVD includes short film and extra footage of the band Fireworks
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