Inside One of the Year’s Most Exciting Film Debuts

_{A version of this story first appeared on The Ankler .}

Greetings from L.A. , where I was lucky to spend Wednesday evening in the company of Noah Hawley, Juno Temple and Lamorne Morris , all of them Emmy nominees for the wonderful fifth season of FX’s Fargo .

You’ll hear our entire conversation next week on the Prestige Junkie podcast feed ( subscribe now! ), and keep an ear out for many more live Prestige Junkie events. We have cool stuff in store, and I’d love to see you in the audience.

I promise more Emmys talk very soon, but today’s newsletter is mostly about movies. I caught up with Thom Powers , friend of The Ankler and documentary programmer for the Toronto International Film Festival, to go over highlights of the newly announced TIFF docs lineup. Then I got the chance to speak with writer and director India Donaldson , whose film Good One first premiered at Sundance back in January. I saw it there, and it’s lingered with me ever since, both for the breakthrough performance of star Lily Collias and Donaldson’s quiet, attentive camera, reminding me of one of my favorite filmmakers, Kelly Reichardt.

With Good One now on its way to theaters in New York and Los Angeles, Donaldson and I chatted about her feature directing debut, and what it takes to acknowledge the tough prospects out there for indie films but forge through making one anyway.

Read on to hear from Powers and then Donaldson, and I’ll see you at the movies — but only once you’re done with your Emmy ballot catch-up, Emmy voters.

True Stories from TIFF

“The world of documentary filmmaking is always reflecting the world we live in,” Thom Powers tells me, pointing to several titles on this year’s TIFF docs lineup — though one of them feels so of the moment it’s almost impossible to believe it exists.

That would be From Ground Zero , a documentary anthology of 22 short films by directors living close to the ongoing conflict in Gaza. As Powers says, “You couldn’t be any more timely than that film.”

There’s also The Last Republican , a documentary portrait of former congressman Adam Kinzinger , who invited director Steve Pink — best known for Hot Tub Time Machine (really!) — to follow him as he led investigations into January 6. It’s premiering outside of the United States, but Powers acknowledges the election-year urgency of the film, one of several in the lineup about “people pushing against corrupt systems.”

The full lineup , as is typical for a festival this large, boasts a wide array of topics, from Eddie Huang ’s look at the final days of Vice Media to the film Powers earmarked as a potential crowd-pleaser: Space Cowboy . The movie, which follows Joe Jennings — a skydiving cinematographer whose work has been seen in everything from the X Games to Bond films — is a “white-knuckle film full of astonishing imagery,” Powers promises.

I’ll be at TIFF in a few weeks alongside my colleague Richard Rushfield , so I’ll report back on whether my fear of heights can survive Space Cowboy , and what sound like a whole lot of other highlights from a festival that’s taking excellent shape.

Into the Woods

India Donaldson had pulled off the impossible, finding the right actress to play the reserved, incredibly observant teenage character at the heart of her film Good One . Then Donaldson did something even more impossible: Delayed her indie film production an entire year so she could work with that actress.

For an independent film on a tight budget, that’s a bold ask, but Donaldson knew it was what she needed. By waiting a year for star Lily Collias to turn 18, and no longer be subject to strict time limits for children on sets, Donaldson and her team could make the most of their time in the Catskills, where Good One follows Collias’ Sam on a weekend hiking trip with her father ( James LeGros ) and his old friend Matt ( Danny McCarthy ).

“I think we used that year to our advantage in unexpected ways,” Donaldson says now, a few days before Good One ’s limited theatrical release courtesy of Metrograph Pictures. Donaldson worked on additional storyboards and raised more money for the production, and also spent more time getting to know Collias, who was finishing high school in New York City but also preparing for her first film role.

“That girl knew that script inside and out,” Donaldson says “She just had it fully in her brain, in her body. I would check in with her periodically and we just got to know each other. The kind of closeness between us and the ease really just imbued the whole process with a more intimate vibe.”

Donaldson had made a few short films, but Good One is her directorial feature debut, one carefully planned to be “makeable in a safe and comfortable way on a limited budget,” as she puts it. Deceptively simple, Good One introduces Sam as an amiable teenager with a good relationship with her dad, who is willing to roll with the punches when Matt’s son drops out of the camping trip, leaving Sam on her own with two middle-aged men who have their own fraught history.

Small moments become huge when the camera lingers on Sam for her reaction, from the men hogging the only beds in the hotel room to a tossed-off comment by a campfire that transforms the entire energy of the film. “I was thinking about how the most important feelings go unsaid,” says Donaldson, who gives most of the film’s dialogue over to the two men even as the camera focuses on Sam, with the dialogue becoming “almost like a texture of the sound design.”

Lingering on the gorgeous scenery and relying on the audience to catch meaningful glances and pauses, it’s a movie you want to let surround you. That makes Good One ’s theatrical release an extra bit of a miracle given the current environment for indies, which have continued to struggle at the box office overall post-Covid.

Metrograph Pictures, a newly established distribution arm of the New York-based arthouse theater, made Good One its first acquisition about a month after its well-received Sundance debut. David Laub , the former A24 executive now leading Metrograph Pictures, called it “exactly the type of project we want to support.”

Good One is not likely to be a Longlegs , which blew past expectations to become Neon’s highest-ever grosser, but joins A24’s Janet Planet to make the case that summer movies can be evocative and absorbing and small, too.

For Donaldson, the theatrical release was “something I hoped for, but not something I expected,” she says. “I was definitely aware of how hard it is.” After finishing production just a single day before the SAG strike would have shut them down, with zero margin for error, she considers everything after that to be an added blessing: “Honestly, every positive step towards people seeing the movie has been a surprise and a relief.”