Northwest Film Forum

In an alternate universe, FROWNLAND might be Lodge Kerrigan’s NAPOLEAN DYNAMITE. A self-described "troll from under the bridge," the painfully awkward Keith Sontag spends his days selling coupons door-to-door and his evenings trapped in a squalid apartment situated in an outer ring of New York City. Finding even the most basic human communication a challenge, Sontag staggers through an uncaring city, attempting to aid a suicidal friend, evict an unctuous roommate and simply attain some measure of self-respect. With FROWNLAND, Bronstein has made a bold and bracing film that is both a savage black comedy and a ragged love letter to an earlier era of independent film. Both the film and its hero are raw, confrontational and unforgettable.
Winner of a Special Jury Prize at the SXSW Film Festival and the Gotham Awards' "Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You" prize. Director Bronstein was nominated for the "Someone to Watch" Award at the upcoming 2008 Independent Spirit Awards.

"An up-close, painfully intimate portrait of a hapless, manipulative schlub, a Loser with a capital L, the film offers for our horror and our empathy a creature whose very existence is a rebuke to the stultifying uniformity (the niceness, the neatness) of what now often passes for American independent cinema...This is personal cinema at its most uncompromising and fierce." -NY Times

"Amazingly accomplished first feature by Ronald Bronstein, made with a crew of four for seemingly little more than the cost of film stock, throbs with the energy and vision that independent filmmaking is all about." -New Yorker

"FROWNLAND announces that underground cinema is alive and well" -Village Voice