Atkins' 'Sour Minnows' Mystifies Fantasia Premiere
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- "Sour Minnows" world premiered at Montreal's Fantasia Festival, with director Harrison Atkins calling the surreal body-snatching comedy a "post-pandemic movie" about friends drifting into becoming strangers and siloed "internet feeding tubes."
- Harrison Atkins spent roughly 40 drafts developing the script, which expanded from an 8-page document into an 80-something-page "cross between a screenplay and a poem" after he grew frustrated trying to sand his weirder projects down for financiers.
- The film stars David Brown (as Ricky), Chase Williamson (as Tepper), and Suzanna Son (as Aura) as roommates who accidentally step into a different plane of existence while grocery shopping in L.A., with Ricky later possessed by a being called "The Yellow Thing."
- Atkins cites the Edward Hopper quote "If I could say it in words, there'd be no reason to paint" as central to his approach, saying he chases "the transcendent third thing that emerges from the friction between two things" rather than intellectualizing where his images come from.
- The picture marks Atkins' sophomore feature, following his 2015 debut "Lace Crater."
- Gersh is representing "Sour Minnows" for worldwide sales as the film searches for distribution.
Why it matters: A filmmaker whose scripts were repeatedly called 'cool but unfinancable' at brunch meetings has now landed Gersh as a worldwide sales rep on a 40-draft hybrid screenplay-poem that premiered at Fantasia. If 'Sour Minnows' secures distribution, it validates Atkins' bet that audiences — not industry gatekeepers — will fund genuinely unclassifiable cinema.
