Film Review: The Street Cleaner, winner of the 2007 Dixie Film Festival’s Mason Dixon Award
October 15th, 2007 by Jacob Clark in Dixie Film Festival, Events
Perpombellar Productions’ The Street Cleaner, starts out like a slasher flick – a mysterious driver picks up a prostitute, only to drug her and lock her in a solid steel-walled cage in his basement. This is the point at which a few viewers typically exit the theater, says Executive Producer Eric Nauert. But the movie, filmed in Savannah, actually takes a turn in a completely different, completely un-clichéd direction, ultimately telling the story of a lonely, guilt-ridden father’s effort to save an anonymous self-destructive young woman, unable as he was to save his own daughter. The movie is told largely via flashback, explaining the man’s back story piece-by-piece as the main plot unfolds chronologically. Bill Oberst, Jr. turns in an emotionally intense performance as the father, amplified by his lack of spoken lines. The actress who plays the prostitute, Karry McLean, gets most of the camera time and makes good use of it too, especially in the skin-crawling heroin withdrawal scenes. The originality of Director Nathanial Nauert’s story and intensity of his direction, compounded with Obertst, Jr.’s and McLean’s strong acting, come together to produce an emotional, thought-provoking film in The Street Cleaner, deserving of the 2007 Dixie Film Festival’s Mason Dixon award for the best submitted short film produced in Georgia.
To read and see more about the film, visit http://www.thestreetcleanermovie.com.
To read more about Perpombellar Productions, visit http://www.perpombellar.com.
Photo by Jacob Clark
November 27th, 2007 at 2:29 pm
This is a great review to a great film. It starts out creepy, but if you stay with it, the movie leaves you with a sense of wonder and wholeness, even in the face of the street cleaner’s methods for helping the troubled souls he observes during his nightly shift cleaning up Savannah’s streets.