Needle in a Haystack; RADiUS Comfort Safdie Bros.’ “Heaven Knows What”

After landing more audience “friendly” items in Ross Katz’ Adult Beginners and Richard LaGravenese’s The Last 5 Years, RADiUS’ Tom Quinn and Jason Janego have made their third pick-up of the Toronto Int. Film Festival (technically their first post-fest item) with a boundary-pushing/raw street film that blurs the lines between docu and fiction. After world preeming in Venice, and TIFF, the Safdie Bros.’ Heaven Knows What lands at NYFF tomorrow and will be pegged with a second quarter 2015 release.

Gist: Written by Ronald Bronstein and Josh Safdie, this is based on Arielle Holmes’ soon-to-be-published memoir Mad Love in New York City and tells the story of a vagabond couple in NYC battling addiction amidst a manic love affair.

Worth Noting:  Creative members of the Safdies collaborative include Ronald Brownstein, mutli-tasking actress Eleonore Hendricks and for a second outing, Sean Price Williams (Dp on Alex Ross Perry’s films).

Do We Care?: With a stop over in Venice, (we’ve been keeping tabs on the tandem since The Pleasure of Being Robbed and Go Get Some Rosemary aka Daddy Longlegs days) this might be the Safdies’ best work yet to date. Jordan labels the film as “an open-hearted, rawly bellicose realization of addiction has only been graced on celluloid but a handful of times, making the Safdie’s film a new exemplar of narcotic cinema for the ages.”