Egghead & Twinkie (2023 |  USA |  87 min. |  Sarah Kambe Holland)

Twinkie’s an artist who reclaimed a nickname for being teased for being “yellow on the outside, white on the inside” and increasingly feels out of place at home, not because her adoptive parents are white and she’s Chinese, but because they’re conservative and she’s secretly gay. Egghead’s her best friend, an engineering nerd bound for Stanford in a matter of weeks. He’s also something of a manic pixie dream boy ally, a straight bestie who pined after her for years, but who instantly rebounds to the friendzone after a surprise kiss pushed her out of the closet. We’re dropped into the story of their friendship as they hash out an argument at a roadside dinner. Twinkie’s illustrations often escape from page to screen, text messages pop into the frame, animations heighten emotions, and backstories emerge through flashbacks within flashbacks. The poppy recollection takes place over the course of a hasty road trip from Florida to Dallas with low-stakes adventures along the way as Twinkie schemes to finally meet her long-distance internet crush. Louis Tomeo are Sabrina Jieafa are maybe a little too charming in the title roles, but this isn’t a gritty meditation on the perils of being queer on the open road. Instead it’s a sunny coming-of-age picture, gilded with rainbows, winning performances, sick beats, laughs, and a few life lessons. A nice change of pace, especially for a YA audience.

Egghead & Twinkie has in-person SIFF screenings on Friday May 19 and Saturday May 20. It will also be available on SIFF.tv screening from May 22-28.

The Quiet Migration (2023 |  Denmark | 102 min. |  Malene Choi)

Malene Choi’s contemplative film opens like a Axel Schovelin landscape painting: soft rolling hills of hay on a dairy farm under the blue-gray sky in Danish countryside. We’re lulled into a sense of pastoral beauty under low clouds that could have been set anytime in the last two centuries. Then a rock falls from space and isn’t mentioned again for an hour.

As a metaphor for trans-national adoption, it isn’t subtle. But this astronomical event is the exception to the otherwise deeply quiet film (original truth-in-advertising title: Stille Liv), which subscribes to the “every frame a painting” school of cinematography in observing the life of Carl (Riedel-Clausen) as he returns on the cusp of adulthood from years of boarding school to the older parents who adopted him from Korea as a young child. Dialogue is sparse among these Danish farmers, leaving the birth of a calf, the reliable cuteness of kittens, and the regular rhythm of daily chores and meal to speak for themselves. A celebration of an aunt’s sixtieth, nights out with an immigrant intern, and a delayed birthday at a Chinese restaurant provide glimpses of Carl’s plight as an outsider in his own life (he’s one of at the three Asian-ancestry people we see in his town) where he silently endures casual racism and struggles with the impeding decision about whether to take over the family business. Later, discovery of that meteorite, jars the film’s mode ever-so-slightly into magic realism as a reminder of Carl’s yearning duality.

The Quiet Migration has a second SIFF screening at Shoreline Community College on Sunday May 21st.