EXCLUSIVE NEW TRAILER: Amy Seimetz's SXSW hit "Sun Don't Shine" Goes to Edinburgh Film Festival

One of the breakout hits at SXSW 2012 was Amy Seimetz's feature directing debut, the steamy Florida noir "Sun Don't Shine," a well-shot micro-budget portrait of a couple on the run for murder. The film will play at Rooftop Films' Annual Summer Series June 9th in a selection of SXSW films making their New York premieres, and will also head for the Edinburgh Film Festival on June 21. It still seeks a North American distributor.

Seimetz is one of the young peripatetic talents flourishing in today's indie-barter film community. (See Richard Brody's excellent description here.) Like David Lowery, Alex Karpovsky, Mark Duplass, Joe Swanberg, Ti West, Lynn Shelton and others, Seimetz is a producer ("The Dish & the Spoon," "Silver Bullets"), a writer ("Sun Don't Shine"), an actress ("Tiny Furniture," "Alexander the Last") and now, a gifted filmmaker. She moves from project to project, festival to festival, meeting new friends and collaborators, who help each other make films. It's how they survive low budgets and income. And they're having a great time.

Seimetz recruited fellow experimental filmmaker Kentucker Audley and now ubiquitous actress Kate Lyn Sheil to star as the couple, one rational, the other an "emotional fireball," trying to escape from a bad situation. Seimetz shot up close in intense July Florida heat with grainy Kodak Super 16 for her first stab at not-so-conventional narrative. "I wanted to make a movie based on pure anxiety and emotion," she says.

This movie fits comfortably in the young lovers-on-the-run mold of "They Live By Night," "Badlands," or "Sugarland Express"; it's also about beautiful people who are unaccountably dumb and messed up. No one else but Seimetz could have shot this movie, which is quintessentially of the here and now. 

See this exclusive new trailer and my SXSW interview with Seimetz below.