April X, the new film directed and co-written by Michel K. Parandi, had its world premiere Thursday night at Providence Place Mall’s Showcase Cinema as part of the 43rd annual Flickers’ Rhode Island International Film Festival. Playing to a crowd of film fans and festival goers with cast and crew in attendance, this Romanian-American co-production was rapturously received.
The film follows twins Baxter (Connor Storrie) and April (Lilly Krug) in a dystopian cyberpunk future not too far removed from our own world, where the siblings struggle to make their monthly rent through a shadowy organ trade. In a sinister and mysterious twist, April goes missing, and Baxter devotes his life to finding his sister.
Creating a world both futuristic and familiar, many of its most sci-fi ideas are merely extrapolations of the present, such as human drivers being uncommon in a world that allows machines to navigate, or drones deployed by police to remotely track down criminals. It's a world rooted in landmark futurist works such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s seminal 1973 television series World on a Wire and Katsuhiro Otomo’s 1988 film Akira, but pushes the post-modern pastiche of cyberpunk to cover a post-Soviet Europe. The concrete edifices of the city, and details like a cat roaming an empty shopping mall at night, help April X create an atmosphere of its own while still acknowledging its predecessors in the genre.
It’s an atmosphere director of photography Nathan Haugaard paints in cyan and red, as if using the stop and go lights on a traffic light as his palette. Lens flares bloom on highway chases at night, reflecting on rain drop stained glass windows and on the visor of a motorcycle helmet. Art director Oana Novicov further brings this vision to life with small but impactful moments of set design, like the electronic signs outside of rooms, or the collage of photographs of April in her room -- a seemingly endless duplication of her image that serves as both background for her character’s life before the film, a constant reminder when she disappears, and an allusion to the cloning, or “dupe,” technology introduced in the film.
If it sounds like a lot, it is, but leads Storrie and Krug take it in stride, and viewers will be excited to go on this journey with them. For those open to bold images of the future and big ideas, April X is a fast-moving film to grab on to. Updates about April X can be found on its Instagram page. Flickers’ Rhode Island International Film Festival runs through Sunday, August 10th.
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