News

Oscilloscope—a production company responsible for such films as Wuthering Heights and We Need to Talk About Kevin—presents this two-disc set containing award-winning documentaries about “youth, what it means to be young, and what it’s like growing up.” Both films follow a trio of youths, watching them grow up and interacting (and reacting) to the world around them. And although one of them manages to paint an endearing portrait of adolescence, the other one remains a mystifying dreamscape of hedonism through a child’s eye.

Only the Young is the former, more engaging documentary. Filmmakers Jason Tippet and Elizabeth Mims follow three young teenagers in a poor Southern Californian town. As Kevin Conway works his way towards high school graduation, his best friend Garrison Saenz and Skye Elmore deal with their own romantic entanglements. They have such earnest and innocent demeanors that everything they do shines with honest vibrancy.

Nominated for the Truer Than Fiction prize at this year's Independent Spirit Awards, Only the Young is a small documentary that is creating a great deal of buzz. Documentarians Elizabeth Mims and Jason Tippet discovered their subjects, Kevin Conway and Garrison Saenz, in a skate park in Santa Clarita, a Californian town hit particularly hard by the recession in 2008. Using a stylized lens and a light touch, the filmmakers elicited remarkably candid and open interchanges with the teens, providing audiences with refreshing insights into that unique time in our lives when childhood has past and adulthood seems far in the future. The friendship between Kevin and Garrison is inspiring. Brought together by common interests like punk-rock, Christianity and skateboarding, the two are always hanging out, which grows complicated as Garrison begins to date Skye Elmore, a refreshing, alternative beauty with baggage of her own. Against ...

The AFI Film Fest (11.01-11.08) have announced the line-ups for our favorite sections at the fest in the Young American selections and New Auteurs section and they’ve managed to stack up on titles that are amongst the year’s best and which in the case of two films were mysteriously passed over by the likes of Telluride, Tiff and Nyff. Michel Franco’s After Lucia (see pic above) and Antonio Campos’ Simon Killer will be making the Los Angeles premieres accompanied by the best title to come out of the Main Comp at this year’s Cannes edition in Sergei Loznitsa’s In the Fog. This trio will be joined by a trio of gems that recently premiered at Tiff in: Maja Miloš’ Clip, Gabriela Pichler’s Eat Sleep Die and Tobias Lindholm’s A Hijacking. In the Young American Selections we find some filmmakers (Sean Baker and Amy...

Oscilloscope Pictures has added to its consistently strong catalog of films by snapping up Only the Young, the debut feature from documentarians Jason Tippet and Elizabeth Mims. The film made its debut at True/False earlier this year and won Silverdocs shortly afterwards, while its directors made it onto our “25 New Faces” list for 2012.

In his profile of Tippet and Mims, Scott wrote the following aboutOnly the Young:

One day, [Tippet and Mims] met high school seniors Kevin Conway and Garrison Saenz at a skate park in Canyon Country, an economically ravaged town located within Santa Clarita, Calif. Skaters, Christians and best friends, Conway and Saenz “didn’t pay attention to the camera,” Tippet says, “and those are the kind of people we’re interested in.” …[T]hey filmed the teens, and three months in found their dramatic conflict: Skye Elmore, Saenz’s quasi-girlfriend, who has kissed Conway and not him.

Over a shoot that lasted almost two years,...