PETE OHS — ERUPCJA

Every time I make a film, I experiment with genre in some way. I’ve moved from sci-fi fantasy to quirky comedy to supernatural horror. But after moving from Los Angeles to Warsaw at the end of 2023, I realized I had now gained direct access to one of my favorite genres—the “foreign film.”

There’s something so unique about watching a movie that is in a different language from your own. You receive it differently. Constantly glancing at the bottom of the screen to read subtitles affects how you feel about the acting, the cinematography, the editing. By making my own foreign film, I was excited to find out what was lost and found in translation. — Pete Ohs

Erupcja—a descendant of the narrated works of Varda, Godard, Rohmer, et al—is a chosen-family affair joining the writing and acting talents of Charli xcx, Lena Góra, Jeremy O. Harris, and Will Madden with writer-director Pete Ohs. Moved nearly 1,000 miles east of the clichés of “Paris,” the film finds British couple Bethany (xcx) and Rob (Madden) on a trip to Warsaw, with Rob looking for a marriage-proposal spot that combines “magic and stability.” Bethany is otherwise engaged with her old Warsaw buddy Nel (Góra), to whom she confesses that with Rob, “the earth doesn’t shake.” What does shake are the volcanos that Bethany and Nel claim erupt around the world whenever they meet. In its 70-minute running time, Erupcja delights in and pays tribute to the mythologies we create around the poetry of happenstance—indeed, lines from Byron’s “Darkness” are recited at one point, to moving effect. As the artist Claude (Harris) puts it: “Coincidences are vestiges of our youth, how we used to order worlds when we were young.”

Now playing, the Nuart will host Q & A screenings with Ohs and Harris. See info and links below.