@2026 by mezzanine film, inc.









TALKING TO STRANGERS
directed by Rob Tregenza
1988, U.S., 90m, DCP

West Coast premiere of a new 4K restoration, followed by a recorded conversation with Rob Tregenza

Thursday, August 20
2220 Arts + Archives
2220 Beverly Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90057

doors/bar: 7:30pm
film: 8:00pm

Among the most distinctive American debuts of the 1980s, maverick independent filmmaker Rob Tregenza’s haunting, formally audacious feature—beloved by Jean-Luc Godard and Jonathan Rosenbaum, yet never available on home video—now appears in a beautiful restoration. Known for its elaborate structural gambit, Tregenza’s film is made up of nine scenes, each filmed in a single eleven-minute take in various locations in Baltimore, with elaborately choreographed camera movements and an intricately calculated mise-en-scene. We watch an aspiring, somewhat unstable writer (Ken Gruz) meets a series of strangers, with whom he is confronted with probing questions about life, religion, ethics, art and love. Perhaps infamously, the film’s sequence order was randomized by Tregenza, save for the first and last scenes—and yet “the possibility of accident and error hovers over every moment suspensefully, as in a jazz improvisation” (Rosenbaum). A radical achievement of film style, we are thrilled to present Tregenza’s film to a new audience.

Special thanks to Nick Newman.

“[A] Masterpiece… If one of the earmarks of a groundbreaking work is its capacity to confound and/or challenge existing categories and assumptions, Tregenza’s first feature qualifies on several counts. Frankly and audaciously ‘experimental’ — in the original rather than the generic sense of that term — it is shot in wide-screen 35-millimeter and direct Dolby sound, implicitly inviting us to experience it as a movie in a theater, not as a film in an austere screening space. Financed and photographed by the writer-director himself, a Baltimore resident who raised the money by making TV commercials, it combines the rigors of elaborate preplanning with the bold risk taking of an aleatory event.” -Jonathan Rosenbaum

“An astounding formal tour de force and a film of remarkable and often troubling emotional density...It's rare to encounter a film with such a strong commitment to its characters and situations that also manages to maintain a powerful theoretical thrust in its thinking and rethinking of film style. It isn't an easy film to take, but movies that break new ground seldom are.” -Dave Kehr


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