The Fixer
Description
Director Ian Olds’s fiction feature debut is a captivating tale set in the wildest back roads of Sonoma County, a place he richly renders as both a place of menacing secrets and an oddball paradise. After fleeing his home in Afghanistan, military interpreter and budding reporter Osman (A Girl Who Walks Alone at Night‘s Dominic Rains) finds himself unceremoniously plunked down amidst bohemian spirit-seekers and low-rent criminals when he’s taken in by Gloria (Melissa Leo), the local sheriff and mother of a wartime journalist friend. When Osman accompanies her on a domestic disturbance call, he comes face to fist with the charismatic yet vaguely sinister Lindsay (a nearly unrecognizable, long-haired James Franco). Against her warnings, the two strike up a tentative, unlikely friendship—until Lindsay goes missing and a backwoods gangster turns up dead. Unpredictable, ominous, yet surprisingly funny, The Fixer deftly weaves disparate tones to create a vivid, lived-in portrait of a California rarely seen in film. Supported through multiple funding rounds of SFFS/KRF grants, Olds’s film is perhaps the most anticipated Bay Area film of the year. —Michelle Devereaux
Noted documentarian and editor Ian Olds won an Independent Spirit Award for his acclaimed 2005 documentary Occupation: Dreamland. His Emmy-nominated 2009 documentary Fixer: The Taking of Ajmal Naqshbandi (2009), which explores the kidnapping of an Afghan translator, earned him the Best New Documentary Filmmaker prize at the Tribeca Film Festival. In 2012, he co-wrote and co-directed Francophilia, an experimental documentary that utilizes footage from frequent collaborator James Franco’s stint on daytime drama General Hospital. The Fixer is Olds’s first fiction feature.
Film Details
Language English
Year 2016
Runtime 108
Country USA
Director Ian Olds
Producer Caroline von Kuhn, Jennifer Glynn
Writer Paul Felten, Ian Olds
Editor Scott Cummings, Joe Murphy, Ian Olds
Cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra
Music Jim McHugh
Cast Dominic Rains, Melissa Leo, James Franco, Rachel Brosnahan