‘The Tower’ | (cinematic happening)

A crowd filled the Orpheum Theater in Fairfield, IA for the premiere of 2024-25 Big Field Fund Project Grantees Philip Rabalais and Auden Lincoln-Vogel’s “The Tower.” The night was a singular chance to witness and celebrate the filmmakers’ inventive schemes, attentive energy, and nuanced knowledge of the place and the cast. The room was full and giddy; the filmmakers’ excitement and gratitude palpable. “The Tower” served as an interface, placing the setting of the film into the community, as a nested event. Cast, crew, and audience scrambled together and occasionally merged, in situ. Fairfield, the muse and anti-hero, was the crux of the film. As the project came into view, surrounded by such a supportive and involved audience, the room was moved. To hilarity, to tears, to fear, and to wonder.

Sequences of technical virtuosity appear in the midst of stochastic, peripatetic footage, sometimes shot by the film’s child actors, sometimes drawn from cellphone archives. Innumerable plots trail through gorgeous settings spliced with improvisatory reflection and improbable undercurrents. A hyper-localized joyfulness of chance and boredom, so familiar to small towns and artistic practice, treats crisis with tenderness. 

Find out more about “The Tower” at https://oslinepictures.com/projects/tower and https://www.instagram.com/osline.pictures/.

Congrats to all!

Images courtesy Kalmia Strong and Philip Rabalais