To coincide with the premiere of Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind in Competition at Cannes, we present the admired filmmaker’s feature debut River of Grass. Shot in creaky motels across Broward County, Florida, Reichardt’s homespun crime film sees the director upturn the conventions of the road movie. The Mastermind — Reichardt’s new Massachusetts-set art heist film — stars Bill Camp, Alana Haim, Gaby Hoffmann, John Magaro, and Josh O’Connor.

Reichardt made River of Grass in 1994 and did not make another feature-length film for another 12 years. She’s said making the film was “almost like film school” in that it taught her “about ways of putting things together.” Inspired by her own upbringing in Miami’s suburbs, as well as her love of Hollywood noirs and Terrence Malick, River of Grass possesses a constellation of interests that Reichardt has continued to build upon as a filmmaker.

“It’s a genre film, it’s a road movie, and so it was sort of the idea that the road movie had played itself out—how could the genre be deconstructed?” KELLY REICHARDT

 

Made at a moment when the status of the outsider had been co-opted by mainstream culture, River of Grass was Reichardt’s attempt at making a “deflated” outlaw film for an era in which “even the Burger King slogan tells you to ‘Break the Rules.’” Her patient shots and zigzagging narrative can be seen as a reprieve from the brash stylization of similar bad-boy flicks that came out in theaters in the ‘90s — think Point Break or True Romance. Instead, what Reichardt offers is a moodier variation on the latter, made with friends and informed by her own experience visiting her father’s crime-scene office as a kid.

Kelly Reichardt was born in Miami, Florida, in 1964. She attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and then worked on film sets for the likes of Todd Haynes and Hal Hartley. River of Grass received several accolades after its release at Sundance in 1994, and her subsequent feature, Old Joy, became the first American film to earn the Tiger Award at IFFR in 2006. Reichardt has since developed one of the most unique filmographies in the United States, attending to the lives of working-class women, artists, and activists.

Text written by Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer. Special thanks to Oscilloscope.