When You Get to the Forest Gets to the Drafthouse

Eric Power's films are known for their violence. The Austin cut-paper animator's debut, Path of Blood, was a samurai revenge drama. His second, Attack of the Demon, was a zombie gore fest. But his latest is a breeze of peacefulness. He said, "I wanted the film to feel comfortable, that there's this cabin in the woods that you can retreat to."

That tone, he said, was extremely important to both him and screenwriter Andreas Petersen when creating their mythical arborial fantasy, When You Get to the Forest, which gets its Austin premiere this Monday at the Alamo Lakeline. "We wanted static shots of trees laying for minutes on end," Power said.

The pacing may be different to his earlier work, but Power noted that the film forms part of an informal trilogy of "forest-centric movies." This time, the forest is everything and everywhere, as the recently orphaned Dana (voiced by the filmmaker's wife, Alicia Power) finds herself deep in the woods with a talking cat, Lakris (Marcella Campos), as her sole companion. Power called it "a coming of age story for young adults, where Dana's in her mid-20s and been crapped on by the world, and I think most people have been there."

The script started over a decade ago as a folder on Power's desktop marked "Forest Project." He was unsure what he would do with it, even considering it as an art installation. "It always had a mystical element to it, and I went, 'maybe it's the afterlife.' but I'm an atheist, so when I thought about it that wasn't what I wanted to do." After he wrote Attack of the Demon with Petersen, he reopened that folder for their next collaboration, and with Petersen's collaboration it evolved into "a quasi-survivalist story with a philosophical bent."

Power and Petersen's own long strange trip began last July when the film premiered at the Maine International Film Festival (see "Into the Woods", July 8, 2022), and continues next month when Power flies to Japan as a guest of the inaugural Niigata International Animation Film Festival.

But before then the film screens at Alamo Drafthouses across the nation as part of the chain's World of Animation series, a program that has previously screened classics like Millennium Actress and Song of the Sea. Power had got to know series programmer Robert Saucedo after screenings of Attack of the Demon>, and so showed him his next project. He recalled Saucedo telling him, "'I really like this, can I show this?' Well, I'm not going to stop you."

Now not only does the film get its Austin debut, but it will also be the first time he and Petersen will be in the same room since the Attack of the Demons premiere, having made When You Get to the Forest remotely across the pandemic. The only way the screening could be more complete, he joked, is if it had its own themed meal. "There would be dried grasshoppers."

---

When You Get to the Forest screens Mon. Feb. 20, 9:30pm, Alamo Lakeline, 14028 Hwy. 183 N. drafthouse.com.