Independent Film Festival Boston 2009

Directors David Redmon & Ashley Sabin in attendance.

It’s not just that his girlfriend is invisible, although that certainly raises some eyebrows. Charles’s invisible girlfriend also happens to be Joan of Arc, a.k.a. the Maid of Orleans, a.k.a. (as Charles calls her) Joanie, the teenage general. She’s got a very big sword, so you don’t want to mess with her. Charles has decided to ride his bicycle 400 miles from his parents’ home in Monroe back to New Orleans, where he met her, in order to determine once and for all whether a sweet bartender who lives there is really the physical manifestation of Joanie. In the course of his whimsical road trip, Charles encounters found-object artwork dangling from a chain-link fence, a museum of fallen soldiers, a grounded riverboat, and a whole mess of southern hospitality.

Festival favorites David Redmon and Ashley Sabin (INTIMIDAD, IFF Boston 2008) have a knack for finding unusual stories about New Orleans: in MARDI GRAS: MADE IN CHINA (IFF Boston 2005), they traced the sordid origins of the city’s famous plastic beads, while in KAMP KATRINA (IFF Boston 2007), they documented a band of misfits forming a makeshift community after the hurricane. INVISIBLE GIRLFRIEND adds to their body of work by showing us today’s Louisiana: a little worse for wear, perhaps, but still beautiful and hopeful, and still pondering the slippery borders between reality and fantasy, life and death.

- Kristina Aikens