Carnivalesque Films brings together stories united by a raw, startling sensibility of disruption and celebration, where excess and transgression percolate in everyday life.
Woodpecker
- Premiered at SXSW
Reviews
"... a beakful of yuks... 'Woodpecker' soars above the bulk of low-budget Amerindie farces, if not above the director's earlier 'The Hole Story', now a minor cult fave on DVD. A rare bird himself, Karpovsky remains one to watch." Rob Nelson, Variety
"★★★★ ... I love the way Karpovsky explores the angles on the discovery of the Ivory Billed Woodpecker (namely is this all a hoax or has the bird really made a comeback?) yet his choice to blend fiction and non-fictional elements into the film plays into that idea brilliantly ... 'Woodpecker' is a great, funny and surprisingly moving film that's not to be missed." Don R. Lewis, Film Threat
"A
wonderful sucker punch of a movie...To say any more would ruin one of
the niftiest movie surprises I've encountered." Richard Butler, Kansas City Star
“... it doesn't matter what know when you start watching this movie -- after 10 minutes, you're going to be questioning and second-guessing. That's part of the ass-backwards, off-kilter enjoyment of ‘Woodpecker’”. Jette Kernion, Cinematical
Description
It's hard to say who is the stranger creature in this existential tragicomedy – the unusually large and brilliantly feathered Ivory-Billed Woodpecker or Johnny Neander, the amateur poet who has made it his mission to track down the long-thought-extinct bird in the swamps of Eastern Arkansas. Unlike the countless fanatics that descended upon the area after the Ivory-Billed was allegedly spotted, Johnny’s search seems to be much more personal and perverse, despite the fact that he really has no idea how to go about it.
A hilarious and often poignant portrait of a man lost in the world and his own skin, Woodpecker features the dark brilliance of Jon e. Hyrns (star of the celebrated documentary Johnny Berlin) and a soundtrack with original contributions from Colin Greenwood of Radiohead. Much like the bird itself, the film explores the intersection of fact and fiction, resulting in a hybridized and quixotic journey embracing hope, perception, and some very very strange birds.