Frownland

Frownland

2007. USA. Written and directed by Ronald Bronstein. With Dore Mann, Paul Grimstad, David Sandholm. Ronald Bronstein’s 2007 film Frownland is like a bullet from an earlier era of New York underground filmmaking, a sludgy, blackly comic piece of postmodern miserabilism with a protagonist worlds away from the twenty-something hipsters found in so many other 2000s independent film debuts. It depicts a few days in the life of a socially challenged door-to-door coupon salesman and is both psychological character study and a penetrating look at life in the margins. Filmmaker Magazine sponsors an IFP Gotham Award, a collaboration with MoMA, and Frownland won this Best Film Not Playing at a Theater New You prize in 2007. 106 min.