Letters from the Big Man at BAMcinemaFest

There are some things you can firmly count on seeing at an independent film festival in Brooklyn: quarter-life crises, people coming to terms with things, irony, and kitsch. You have to go pretty far down the list of expectations to get to movies about interdimensional telepathic sasquatches, which is why we leapt at the chance to see Christopher Munch's Letters from the Big Man. We can honestly say that we've never seen anything quite like it. Judging from the Q&A afterward, Munch seems to believe in the reality of sasquatches, talking as if he'd made a documentary, and the film contains nary a ripple of incredulity (or humor) about its subject matter. The story is often confusing, the acting sometimes as wooden as the surroundings, and the cheesiness meter goes well past eleven, but there are moments of startling, bizarre beauty, and we admired the audacity of its uncompromising earnestness. One of the producers, whose advice Munch had ignored but who came to see the finished product at the New York premier anyway, struck this same note at the end: "This is a brave movie. You've dared to not make a work of art."

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