Following its European Premiere at the Raindance Film Festival, La Femme International Film Festival in Los Angeles will be screening Jane Spencer’s dark, philosophical drama The Ninth Cloud on Saturday October 18th, 7pm at the Regal Theatre.
Set in 90s London, The Ninth Cloud tells the story of Zena (Megan Maczko), who, trying to escape the grief of her family being killed in a plane crash, becomes infatuated with fellow American Bob (Michael Madsen), an enigmatic but failed poet and writer, who has taken up residency in a Hackney squat. Searching for hope through Bob’s artistic visions, whilst clinging on to her fragile grasp of reality, Zena collides and colludes with an array of desperados, angst-ridden IT girls and debauched failed artists. Two men in particular zero in on her: Brett, a narcissistic socialite (Leo Gregory), and Jonny, a drink-drowning musician searching for a way to re-surface (Jean Hughes Anglade). But it is to the unattainable Bob that Zena is mystically drawn to – as if only he holds the answer to the meaning of her life…
In discussion of The Ninth Cloud director Jane Spencer says, “The film is about a group of people from all walks of life, trying to find hope in a world full of darkness and tragedy…I grew up watching films from the 1960’s ‘free cinema’ movements and idolised the work of Lindsay Anderson, Tony Richardson, John Schlesinger, and also the philosophical films of that time; the French films of Truffaut, and especially Jacques Rivette. I suppose The Ninth Cloud is a ‘homage’ to those films, in a way.”
Meanwhile producer Julia Verdin offers, “One of the things that attracted me to this project is that it is a film about escapism. All of the character is their different ways are trying to escape from reality and living in worlds that they have created for themselves and so blocked from moving forward by their own perceptions which I think is something that audiences will identify with.”
For further information or to book tickets visit: http://www.lafemme.org/
Read our review of The Ninth Cloud here, and our interview with director Jane Spencer here.
Originally published October 15, 2014. Updated April 13, 2018.
