Vintage Violence Premieres at TIFF in Phone-Screen Style — SkimNews
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- Eugene Kotlyarenko's "Vintage Violence" world premieres Sept. 12 at the Toronto International Film Festival, following his similarly internet-minded 2020 thriller "Spree"
- Cole Sprouse plays livestreamer Carter Tipe, who discovers vintage denim in a cave and is lured to Japan by fan Izumi (Kiko Mizuhara), only to be chased by police, criminals, hustlers, and the Yakuza
- The film uses bifurcated screens splitting between Carter's livestream—flooded with fan comments and emojis—and Japanese viewers, a format Kotlyarenko designed for audiences used to scanning phones while watching
- Kotlyarenko cites Brian De Palma and Pedro Almodóvar as inspirations and channeled Japanese filmmakers Imamura, Ōshima, Miki, and Obayashi, shooting on location with a local crew and DP Sean Price Williams using dollies and Steadicam
- The director shot Carter's cave scene before principal production in Japan so actors could interact with a real, edited livestream on their phones rather than a green-screen placeholder
- Kotlyarenko frames cinema's history as "the history of voyeurism" and argues phone-screen voyeurism has been "barely explored in cinema"
Why it matters: A TIFF world premiere gives "Vintage Violence" prime visibility for distribution deals in the indie/art-film market, and its bifurcated livestream format is a concrete technical bet: if second-screen viewers can follow a story split between a livestream and Japanese chase sequences, it could reset expectations for how films engage phone-distracted audiences.
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