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Video: Penny Lane’s Hail Satan? | 2019 Sundance Film Festival

A fourth feature docu film in a half dozen years (Our Nixon, NUTS!, The Pain of Others), Penny Lane‘s delves into The Satanic Temple from an inquisitive, business start-up angle with Hail Satan?. Featuring an eloquent speaker, spokesman and excellent selfie taker in Lucien Greaves, this clearly and cleverly illustrates that the baby-step process of moving past basements with Dungeons & Dragons to a legit enterprise comes with all the organizational quirks, joys and difficulties you’d expect. Exploratory in nature and jovial in tone, Hail Satan? looks at folks (the majority are dressed in black) who are challenging the status quo (especially from a jurisprudential stance) and to be quite frank, are adhering to principles, beliefs and value systems that are closer to the populous than any Charlton Heston memorabilia could do. Magnolia landed the film pre-fest before a film festival double dip at Sundance and Rotterdam, this is a Q&A at one of the later Sundance screenings — this one took place in the heart of the church going Salt Lake City.

Eric Lavallée is the founder, CEO, editor-in-chief, film journalist and critic at IONCINEMA.com (founded in 2000). Eric is a regular at Sundance, Cannes and TIFF. He has a BFA in Film Studies at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema. In 2013 he served as a Narrative Competition Jury Member at the SXSW Film Festival. He was an associate producer on Mark Jackson's This Teacher (2018 LA Film Festival, 2018 BFI London). In 2022 he served as a New Flesh Comp for Best First Feature at the 2022 Fantasia Intl. Film Festival. Current top films for 2022 include Tár (Todd Field), All That Breathes (Shaunak Sen), Aftersun (Charlotte Wells).

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