Indie films have had it rough during the past 18 months. No festivals to speak of, getting a theatrical release is hard to come by as well. It’s the Covid thing, you know.
You can hang out at Costco or Walmart or the local supermarket with hundreds of strangers, but God forbid you go to a movie theatre, you will get the Covid for sure and suffer greatly.
Back in October of 2019, writer/director Marshall Burnette finished his film and delivered it to its first of what should have been a string of film festival competitions. You can only imagine what happened after that … nothing.
However, Oscilloscope Laboratories, who is probably one of the best at finding these little gems. sought-out Burnette in March of this year and reached an agreement to acquire the distribution rights to his film, Silo.
How Oscilloscope found this gem is certainly a “trick of the trade,” but on the first street-date Tuesday of September it will be available as both DVD and Blu-ray product offerings ... Silo up until that date will be virtually unseen by the public.
They saw a good thing and the general public will get a chance to finally see this harrowing tale of courage, survival and how a small farming community came together to try and save one of their own.
It’s corn or wheat, you known, grain … it’s just little kernels of the stuff that bread and cakes and pies and all sorts of yummy things are made of. It seems innocuous, but it can be the source of powerful explosions — the dust in a grain elevator, once ignited is like a mountain of dynamite. Tons of it, piled deep, is also like quicksand, you fall in and it just sucks you down … and then smothers you, yes, innocuous.
Inspired by actual events, Silo is the story of a farming community putting aside their differences — everyone knows each other, everyone has history — to come to the aid of Cody (Jack DiFalco — The Goldfinch, Bully). It all happens so quickly, Cody, who is having issues with his widowed mother, Valerie (Jill Paice — singer from the Broadway production of Company; played the role Susan), is working in a grain elevator on a nearby farm with two others when a breakdown in communications leads to a flood of corn trapping the young man. He will soon drown; suffocate.
Filmmaker Marshall Burnett, who expanded upon his 2017 short film, Silo: Edge of the Real World, was able to land Emmy-nominated cinematographer Hunter Baker, whose work on the film gives Silo the look of a much-larger budgeted Hollywood production. Burnett, also uses the entrapment of Cody as something of a monster, sinister … cutting between events unfolding in and around the town (backstory development as well) and the ever-growing horror that time will soon run out for the young man.
This edge-of-your-seat thriller is one of the year’s best … Sept. 7 from Oscilloscope as both DVD and Blu-ray product offerings.
Bonus features include the aforementioned short film, Silo: Edge of the Real World, the documentary titled Building the Silo and two panel discussions about the film.
Also heading to Blu-ray and DVD from Oscilloscope Laboratories on Aug. 24 is documentary filmmaker Garin Hovannisian’s Truth to Power.
Hovannisian has become something of a voice of remembrance for the 1915 Armenian Genocide with his 2015 film, 1915: The Movie, and his 2019 documentary, I Am Not Alone. With Truth to Power, Hovannisian takes a different tack by showcasing the music of System of a Down’s Segj Tankian to raise awareness of what happened in 1915 … so that such a thing can never happen again.
Bonus features include deleted scenes and the video titled The Importance of Genocide Recognition.
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