Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival

Monday, November 3-----From iconoclastic American indie director Michael Berggmann comes this sexy political thriller starring Mario Van Peebles and Bonnie Loren. The film begins on the last day of Naomi Holbroke's marriage to a high-ranking British government official. Seeming to be a failure as a housewife, Naomi sets off to reclaim the acting career she gave up “for him” twenty-five years ago.

In France at a film festival, she meets film director Billy Rust and falls in love with…his script, particularly with the sequence in which the girl gets tied to a chair. Alas, the part calls for a “name or a much younger woman” but Naomi perseveres and extracts a promise of a screen test in New York.

Naomi arrives in New York and gets to her screen test at the last minute but only after getting involved with a terrorist suspect, stealing a taxi and discovering what appears to be Billy Rust's dead body.

The film is screening in competition, with its premiere showase tonight at FLIFF. Director Michael Bergmann makes films that are sexy, surreal and entirely original. His feature debut Milk and Money (1995) featured performances by Calista Flockhart, Margaret Colin, Marin Hinkle, Olympia Dukakis and Dina Merrill.  His prize-winning short In Bed With My Books, which explores the interior lives of older women, was an audience favorite at the Montréal festival. Bergmann's other features are Of Two Minds (1994, 2009) Trifling With Fate (2004) and The Reality Trap (2006). He has also appeared as a lecturer and panelist at independent film conferences, speaking on the latest trends in state-of-the-art technology. He believes that the use of the latest digital technology enhances cinematic creativity by enabling filmmakers “to do much more on budgets which restrict them much less”.

Sandy Mandelberger, FLIFF Dailies Editor