TCFF 2022 Closing Night: The Inspection, After the Gunflint, Empire of Light

After two weekends, more than 80 in-person screenings, and another 100+ films streaming on the festival’s virtual platform, Twin Cities Film Fest 2022 came to a close Saturday, Oct. 29 with a final flurry of first-rate films and audience awards. Among the films screening on TCFF’s final day: the new film from A24, Elegance Bratton’s autobiographical The Inspection; a local intergenerational outdoor-thriller After the Gunflint; and Sam Mendes’ newest, Empire of Light. Those and a dozen or so other films were followed by a next-door afterparty and the announcement of the festival’s award winners. Scroll on!

The Inspection (dir. Elegance Bratton, 2022)

Elegance Bratton’s first feature film is based on his own experience as a young gay Black man in the early aughts as he commits to joining the Marines. It’s an intense, moving experience, another in A24’s long line of surprising successes, and a film that takes its depiction of boot camp seriously.

Ellis French, played by Jeremy Pope, is the Bratton character. As the narrative begins he’s down and out, near-homeless, and rejected by his straight-arrow single mother Inez (Gabrielle Union). He seems an unlikely candidate for the Marines with his soft-spoken demeanor and slump-shouldered posture. But with no options for the future, he enlists nonetheless.

And in basic training he endures not just the grueling routines familiar to filmgoers, but a deep-seated prejudice of the “Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell” era, no shortage of latent homoeroticism, and surprisingly, a modicum of the camaraderie and support he could never find in his youth or on the streets. Pope is excellent as a young man who, in his officer’s words, can queer anything, but commits to his enlistment wholeheartedly. So is Union, even if she’s onscreen only at the film’s start and end, in a frosty, conflicted role as a mother whose prejudice runs every bit as deep as her love.

The Inspection is scheduled for wide release Nov. 18, 2022.

This Minnesota-made intergenerational drama is written and directed by J. D. O’Brien and has been more than three years in the making, following a pandemic-related hiatus after production began in 2019. While a film made, as O’Brien says, for “$30,000 and favors,” can scarcely compete with new studio productions from A24 or an Academy-Award winner like Sam Mendes, regional festivals like TCFF can provide indie films a real boost. And that was highly apparent in the well-received screening of After the Gunflint.

Too-busy-with-work-for-his-family man David (Al Norby) and his teenage daughter Jenna (Josie Axelson) join her grandpa (and David’s father-in-law) “Pops” (Bruce Purcell) for a northern Minnesota fly-fishing trip that’s full of harsh terrain and generational conflict.

Some old wounds have to be set aside when and old rope-bridge fails as they cross and Jenna breaks her arm. With no way to return across the canyon it bridged, the three now face a 15-mile hike. At camp that evening, old wounds surface between the three, and in the middle of the night, an agitated Pops suffers a heart attack. Now Jenna, her broken arm in spatula-sling, and her conflicted father have to carry Pops, unconscious but alive, to safety.

After the Gunflint must have been an arduous shoot in the Minnesota north woods. In some scenes you can see the mosquitos swarm about the actors like ravenous little locusts. Filming was delayed for a time during COVID, and Axelson, who began the project when she was just 16, was now celebrating her 20th birthday during the Saturday screening, finishing her senior year at New York University. All homegrown talent, Axelson, Norby, and Purcell give the script their all. And while in some places the story lacks the polish or finesse you might see in a major-studio release, After the Gunflint still finds moments of sincere, heartfelt emotion that will impact any father, daughter, or grandfather.

Empire of Light (dir. Sam Mendes, 2022)