USA | 2011 | kolor | 104 min
reż|dir Kelly Reichardt pro|pro Elizabeth Cuthrell sce|sc Jon Raymond zdj|ph Chris Blauvelt muz|mus Jeff Grace mon|ed Kelly Reichardt ob|cast Michelle Williams, Bruce Greenwood, Will Patton, Zoe Kazan, Paul Dano,Shirley Henderson, Neal Huff, Tommy Nelson and Rod Rondeaux dys|dis Cinetic Media, Independent Film Sales

The year is 1845. A wagon team of three families has hired the mountain man Stephen Meek to guide them over the mountains. Claiming to know a short cut, Meek leads the group on an unmarked path across the high plain desert, only to become lost in the dry rock and sage. Over the coming days, the emigrants must face the scourges of hunger, thirst and their own lack of faith in each other’s instincts for survival. When a Native American wanderer crosses their path, the emigrants are torn between their trust in a guide who has proven himself unreliable and a man who has always been seen as the natural enemy. In Meek’s Cutoff, as in her previous films, Reichardt hews to a vision of small-scale cinema characterized by naturalism and close observation of the dispossessed. Loosely tagged as a Western, it could be tempting to look back to the so-called “anti-Westerns” of the early 70s  as the antecedents of Meek’s Cutoff’s unorthodox take on the genre.

AWARDS
2010 Venice International Film Festival –  SIGNIS Award, Golden Lion nomination
2010 Toronto International Film Festival – Official Selection
2011 Sundance Film Festival – Official Selection

DIRECTOR | Kelly Reichardt
Screenwriter and film director working within American indie cinema. Her debut film River of Grass was released in 1994. It was nominated for three Independent Spirit Awards, as well as the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. In 2006, she completed Old Joy, the film won awards from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, Rotterdam International Film Festival. Reichardt is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and teaches at Bard College.