SLAMDANCE FILM FESTIVAL 2024 REVIEW! A Great Lamp is a tone poem in the shape of a film by director and co-writer Saad Qureshi. The (mostly) black and white film opens on Max (Max Wilde), a young non-binary person who seems to be homeless in a small town in North Carolina. Max occupies their time by randomly wheat-pasting flyers of their recently deceased Grandmother on every flat surface. Max wants to preserve memories of her while trying to deal with the grief of losing her. Max is joined by Howie (Spencer Bang) when they meet by chance. Howie is also currently between situations. In fact, he left home because of some trouble there. He tells Max that the spectacle of a rocket launch is coming soon, and they should spread the word and plan to see it together. In a parallel line of the story, we meet Gene (Steven Maier), a young man who has quit a job his father helped him get. Because he still lives at home, he dresses for work and leaves the house each morning as if he were still working so his father doesn’t find out that he quit. He spends his days wandering the city, waiting until it’s time to go home.
They all three roam the city hungry, cold, and under-dressed. Max and Howie try to avoid cops and people calling them out for their flier posting everywhere. They seem to be from a lost generation, looking to find a place, seeking to build a culture to replace the one they’ve rejected.
“…randomly wheat-pasting flyers of their recently deceased Grandmother on every flat surface.”
There’s no plot, per se, outside of random moments of connection and long stretches of lonely isolation. They bounce around the city like steel balls in a pinball machine, seemingly occupying spaces where someone else just left. The brief moments shared are highlights… like a light in a cave. Something real is revealed, and their humanity and vulnerability shine through. His mode of life is not sustainable, and it is clear that each of these young people will eventually need to seek a better way. Howie eventually sees this and has enough of life on the street, returning home. Max continues pasting the image of their Grandmother around, refusing to accept that she’s gone and then is shown doing (bad) stand-up comedy somewhere. Gene continues his charade of pretending to be an employee. They wait for the rocket, looking to the skies.
Qureshi says in an interview that he and his friends don’t watch movies, so they had no particular template for making them. They worked on a micro-budget with no script and asked each player what they’d like to be seen doing on film. That collection of moments was eventually edited into the movie. The entire film is overlaid with simple white animation. Sometimes, it looks like squiggly flaws in the image, but other times, it erupts into text or figures in motion.
Qureshi may not watch movies, but he’s absorbed enough cinema culture somewhere along the line to capture a definite Lynchian aura in The Great Lamp. He shows a tremendous sense here of space and timing, immortalizing brief intersections of human experience with just enough weirdness to keep the viewer locked into this moment, looking for the rocket. Perhaps he’ll continue to make films. Perhaps he’ll write a script. He clearly has something to say. It will be fun to catch up with him in 5 years and ask about his journey from the seeds of ideas in The Great Lamp to wherever he goes next.
A Great Lamp screened at the 2024 Slamdance Film Festival.
"…a tone poem in the shape of a film..."
