In an independent film scene that too often evinces a paucity of imagination, Feast of the Epiphany — directed by Reverse Shot editors Michael Koresky, Jeff Reichert, and staff writer Farihah Zaman — displays a refreshingly protean ambition. The film leaps from a disorienting blend of actors’ screen tests and dramatic line readings to a domestic gathering sketched in snatches of dialogue and bathed in prismatic light. And that’s just the prelude to the main event: an intimate, Brooklyn-set dinner party (observed from its lavish preparation to its closing emotional swell) that transitions, abruptly and decisively, to the fields of Roxbury Farm, a community agriculture space limned in sensorially rich passages (indicative of Reichert and Zaman’s background in documentary). What’s achieved is a delicate interplay between constituent, subtly connected parts which don’t fuse together so much as vibrate in expectation, creating generative flashes of recognition in the process. The sensation is an elusive but recognizable one, of having grasped onto something that somehow feels greater than it is; of being unable to articulate why, and yet knowing with certainty that it is so. Dig deeper. You don’t know what you may find.
Published as part of November 2019’s Before We Vanish.
