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Rebounds and Role-play: Silver’s Latest Returns to Uncomfortable Interactions

With his fourth feature film, Uncertain Terms, indie film director Nathan Silver advances the knack he has for exploring awkward and uncomfortable human interactions within the confines of people suffering through displaced, temporary scenarios. Perhaps more thematically aligned with his 2012 film, Exit Elena, Silver’s penchant for characters seemingly hell bent on making wrong decisions, (a la his aggravating protagonist in Soft in the Head) takes center stage here. Relationships and the nascent notion of responsibility are hardly finite fixtures, something playfully, agonizingly explored.

Robbie (David Dahlbom) has left Brooklyn to works as a handyman for his Aunt Carla (Cindy Silver) in the Hudson Valley. It’s not at first clear why, but he seems to be running away from something back home and without much of a plan. Carol runs a home for pregnant teen girls in the countryside,...

★★★★☆ Writer and director Nathan Silver again seeks to explore the dynamics of communal living just as he did in Exit Elena (2012) to Uncertain Terms (2014). In the latter film, pregnant teens take refuge in the home of Carla (Cindy Silver), who plays a maternal, educator role in their lives and aims to protect them from external anxiety. His fifth feature Stinking Heaven (2015), which received its world premiere at Iffr, focuses on the home of Jim (Keith Poulson) and his wife Lucy (Deragh Campbell) in 1990s suburban New Jersey, who have created a commune for sober living, welcoming any recovering addict to live with them peacefully.

We're proud to announce a new partnership with one of our favorite online film journals, cléo. Every month, cléo will be presenting a great film to watch on our video on demand platform. In conjunction, we'll be hosting an exclusive article by one of their contributors. This month the journal's founding editor, Kiva Reardon, writes on Nathan Silver's Exit Elena, which is available to watch starting June 28 in the Us, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Italy, Norway, and Germany!

I need not sell my soul to buy bliss.

—Jane Eyre, Jane Eyre

Gothic fiction dates back to 1764 with Horace Walope’s The Castle of Otranto. Unlike the lush Romantic novels that had come before, here the supernatural plagued the lead characters and darker thematics prevailed. Walpoe’s book, in addition to being a bestseller of the time, paved the way for the greats of Gothic fiction to come: Mary Shelley,...

Uncertain Terms

Written by Chloe Domont, Nathan Silver and Cody Stokes

Directed by Nathan Silver

USA, 2014

Director Nathan Silver is a rare talent in American indie cinema, capable of drawing great depth from seemingly innocuous situations. His films focus on displacement and youthful uncertainty, tapping as authentically as anyone else into some of his generations most immediate concerns. Though there’s noticeably more at stake than in his breakthrough gem Exit Elena, Silver’s fourth feature is a similarly quiet, intimate portrayal of everyday life.

Uncertain Terms is set in a home for pregnant teenagers, designed to protect them from the judgement and overwhelming pressure of society and family. Run by Carla (Cindy Silver), who went through a difficult time when she fell pregnant at a young age, the home is a frank, liberal environment focused on commonality and support. The girls are from varied backgrounds and have contrasting personalities...

You think running a set in general is hard? Try doing it with your mother. In an IndieWire article where filmmakers were asked what they wish someone had told them before they started shooting, Uncertain Terms writer/director Nathan Silver answered: "Don't cast your mother in one of the leading roles, have her host your cast and crew, and expect her to be happy." Silver's motivation for doing so though lies in a very obvious respect and admiration of his mother. "She's the master of confusion," he says. "Her stories go every which way, but she manages to bring life to everything she says. She knows that life is confusion. I cast her in my movies because the confusion of life is what I'm after."Cindy Silver admits that she...

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...

Every Friday, Indiewire's Springboard column profiles an up-and-comer in the indie world who made a mark that deserves your attention. Nathan Silver has already completed four features, but chances are, unless you're a film festival junkie, you're not familiar with his name. That's bound to change soon. A filmmaker who favors an improvised approach to storytelling over a heavily scripted one, Silver is known in filmmaker circles for his naturalistic character dramas "Soft in the Head" and "Exit Elena." His latest, "Uncertain Terms" just world premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival to rave reviews, and finds the 31-year-old filmmaker applying his muted signature style to a heartrending tale centered on a Brooklynite who flees a troubled marriage to spend time in the Hudson Valley at the home of his aunt (Cindy Silver, the filmmaker’s mother and regular collaborator), where she runs a program for pregnant teens. "'Uncertain Terms...

Filmmaker Nathan Silver has delivered four feature films in about as many years, and the latest, “Uncertain Terms,” continues in the style of naturalistic, bittersweet tales. It’s a family affair for Silver, as he often casts his mother, Cindy Silver, and in “Uncertain Terms” he even takes inspiration from her own life story. Silver the matriarch plays Carla, the proprietress of a home for pregnant teenagers, much like the one where she spent some time as a teenager herself, and Silver the director/co-writer makes an appearance as her layabout son Lenny, whose cousin Robbie (David Dahlbom) shows up at a moment’s notice when his life gets turned upside down. The resulting film is a wry, oddly funny, but poignant work that showcases Silver’s laid-back but effective cinematic storytelling style, and talent for shaping performances from non-traditional actors. Robbie shows up on Carla’s doorstep to cool...

Head Case: Silver Returns With Another Slice of Low-fi Discomfort

At the end of the final credits of Soft in the Head, Nathan Silver dedicates his latest film “For the Idiot,” a nod to his inspiration for as partially being born out of a desire to adapt Dostoevsky’s famous classic, The Idiot, concerning a character released from a sanitarium, whose subsequent interactions with the outside world suggests that the cruelty and duplicity of others is more vicious than the sanitarium. In his 2012 darkly comedic Exit Elena, Silver examines an awkward and uncomfortable relationship allowed to develop because of accepted notions of polite social exchange in a situation predicated by monetary necessity for its main character. His latest also glorifies in the discomfort of mixing company of those living in the comfortable scripts of their lives with the instability of those in a slipping down desperation to find themselves without proper support or resources.

"The comedies of John Cassavetes cut deeper," Thom Andersen explains in Los Angeles Plays Itself, "because he had an eye and an ear for ordinary madness—those flickers of lunacy that can separate us from our fellows." Nathan Silver's Exit Elena adopts many working methods typical of a Cassavetes production—shot almost entirely in Silver's family home, the film stars his girlfriend (Kia Davis, who is superb), his mother (Cindy Silver), and himself—but its affinity with a film like Love Streams, its closest likeness, runs deeper than their shared independent sensibility. Silver locates the ordinary madness bubbling just beneath the surface of his own life, and flickers of lunacy abound: Exit Elena relates the story of a young live-in a...

A Room of One’s Own: Nathan Silver’s Uncomfortable Familial Exploration

Compelling, observant, and uncomfortably funny, Nathan Silver’s latest feature, Exit Elena, is pleasant surprise, a testament of achievement with a shoe string budget. Appearing at first as a docudrama about a live-in nurse, Silver efficiently and swiftly gives us a fast paced exercise of fractured family dynamics, strange socializations centered on an abstract and mysterious woman, and a subtle subtext to ponder.

Elena (Kia Davis), is a newly licensed live-in nurse. A quiet and timid sort, she quickly gets offered a job to care for Florence (Gert O’Connell). Except Florence’s daughter-in-law, Cindy Akerman (Cindy Silver), neglected to tell husband Jim (Jim Chiros) that she hired a live-in nurse. And so immediately, Elena is thrust into an awkward family dynamic, lorded over by the extremely overbearing Cindy, who constantly bickers with her out-of-touch husband and quickly...

“Sorry to put you in the middle of this,” says Cindy Akerman (Cindy Silver) to Elena (Kia Davis), as they sit at breakfast and she argues with her husband about her decision to hire Elena as a live in nurse for his mother without telling him. And so it begins. At 71 minutes long, filmmaker Nathan Silver’s Exit Elena is an exquisite gem of a movie. We watch as Elena is dragged into the dysfunction of family life and struggles to maintain her professional role looking after the elderly Florence (Gert O’Connell) while her employer drags her along to zumba class.

It’s a gentle yet unswerving examination of relationships that blur the boundary between personal and professional, and the tension never lets up for a moment despite the lack of any dramatic artifice beyond the circumstances. Elena is a mysterious creature, compelling in her opacity which exists as...