THE WORLD DROPS DEAD
dir. Brandon Colvin, 2025
United States, 70 min
In English

Claire struggles to cope as the shock of her father’s passing ripples through her small Quaker community. Beset by visions and desperate to reunite with the only person who seemed to understand her, Claire reaches out to her father across the boundary of death.

-to be followed by a screening of-

WHEN THE MOON RETURNS
dir. Brandon Colvin, 2025
United States, 15 min
In English

Young Deirdre and her clan of druids eke out an itinerant existence in the forest. When the threat of Christianizing forces grows more imminent, a holy sacrifice is made that changes Deirdre’s life forever.

Writer/director Brandon Colvin (A Dim Valley) returns with another daringly poetic microbudget salvo from the American south. With The World Drops Dead and the accompanying animated short, When the Moon Returns, the director has created a cryptic cinematic diptych that fearlessly explores a trinity of interrelated concerns—love, faith, and death.

Part What Dreams May Come, part folk horror, part Clive Barker, part Takeshi Miike, Colvin’s pair of elegant new works represent the most exciting possibilities for contemporary independent film. Minimal yet thematically and visually ambitious, these idiosyncratic and emotionally raw films interrogate the darker sides of the human mind and heart without blinking and without suggesting easy answers. Elevated by Colvin and collaborator Aaron Whitt’s hypnotic score, and given thorny psychological depth by the dense, shadowy foliage of its wooded setting, The World Drops Dead is a film rich with sensorial delights.

When the Moon Returns supplements the feature with its own expressive and implicit mythic connections, turning pagan ritual into hallucinatory psychedelia. It’s a heady and satisfying pair of films that revel in their own esoteric complexities as works of intimate fantasy, love, and grief only possible outside of the mainstream.