Al Carretta’s Nightpiece Film Festival has now become a regular part of the Edinburgh Fringe. As part of this year’s selection, he has written and directed a new film, But The Main News Tonight.
It’s Carretta’s 26th indie feature, and this time his subject is an experimental, pseudo-documentary-style drama set in a hospital, where video evidence from several years in the 1990s uncovers a disturbing trend of malpractice.
Josephine Surminski (Moss), Carretta himself (Evans), Anna Avara (Dem), Billie Everett (journalist), and six other actors bring this story to life. In the director’s usual style, it is unpredictable, defiantly low budget, and full of unsettling imagery.
A social drama about a naive cleaner, Moss, whose recordings capture the dark goings-on, But The Main News Tonight is a puzzle it feels quite a privilege to unravel. It has creepy moments alongside chirpy dating introductions, mysterious angles, and a story that begins to feel deeply personal.
Carretta has taken great care to assemble items from the 1990s to resemble that decade – tapes, phones, fashion – but tries a bit too hard to shoe-horn in references to upcoming changes like the World Wide Web.
I did like the idea of mixing dating videos with silent shorts in a love letter to film itself. Moss herself is a curiosity, an introvert, and a creative person. There’s a lot of mileage in her story, and although I didn’t quite get it here, it could certainly grow.
But The Main News Tonight is an enigma at heart. Whistleblowing, corruption, and cover-up are at the core, but, just as in Antonioni’s Blow-Up, the images are not the end of the story.
But The Main News Tonight had its premiere at Edinburgh Fringe on 24 Aug as part of the Nightpiece Film Festival.