Sundance Film Festival

SON OF RAMBOW

 

Coming Soon

A runaway audience smash at the Sundance Film Festival, Son of Rambow is a fresh and inventive take on friendship, family, film heroes and the death-defying adventures of growing up in the video age. It all begins in 1980s Britain, when young Will, raised in isolation among a puritanical religious sect in which music and TV are strictly forbidden, encounters something beyond his wildest fantasies: a pirated copy of Rambo: First Blood. His virgin viewing of the iconic thriller blows his mind – and rapidly expanding imagination – wide open. Now, Will sets out to join forces with the seemingly diabolical school bully to make their own action epic, devising wildly creative, on-the-fly stunts, not to mention equally elaborate schemes for creating a movie. But when school popularity finally descends on Will and Lee in the form of the super-cool French exchange student, Didier Revol, their remarkable new friendship and precious film are pushed, quite literally, to the breaking point. Filmed in a creatively mad-cap, homemade style with a mostly amateur cast and a wry, comic-tinged nostalgia, creative visionaries Garth Jennings and Nick Goldsmith, AKA Hammer & Tongs (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), manage to capture both the agony and the giddy ecstasy of a camcorder childhood with humor, poignancy and a rousing dose of cinematic panache.

UK/France, 2007, 96 min., color