‘Columbus’ gets top prize at Malta film festival; watch the trailer

They like the movie “Columbus” in a place far from Indiana.

The movie featuring the city’s architectural gems took home a top prize — Best Feature Film — at the Valletta Film Festival in Malta. Haley Lu Richardson, who stars in the movie, earned the prize for Best Actress.

The movie is slated to open Aug. 4 in New York and Los Angeles, and is scheduled for its local premiere Sept. 1 at YES Cinema in Columbus.

“Columbus” highlights the story of Casey (Richardson), who lives with her mother in a small Midwestern town haunted by the promise of Modernism. Jin (John Cho), a visitor from the other side of the world, attends to his dying father.

In their friendship, they find respite in one another and the architecture and its symbolism that surrounds them.

Filmed last summer during a three-week period from July 31 to Aug. 20 at 16 buildings in downtown Columbus, the artsy “Columbus” film was the first for a Nashville, Tennessee, director who goes by the single name of Kogonada.

https://twitter.com/kogonada/status/878743823383506944

Trailer from ‘Columbus’

Entertainment Weekly has posted a trailer of the movie “Columbus” under the headline: John Cho ponders death, romance in intimately gorgeous Columbus trailer.

Take a look.

 

Here’s what Entertainment Weekly wrote about the movie:

Love and personal ties are matters of life and death in the new trailer for Kogonada’s Columbus, which stars John Cho as Jin, a curious man whose father falls gravely ill, leaving him stranded in the film’s titular Indiana town where he strikes up a meaningful friendship with an architectural enthusiast, Casey (Haley Lu Richardson). The pair’s connection then probes a soul-searching (and, judging by the clip, breathtakingly gorgeous) exploration of familial duties for both parties.

“There’s this belief that if you’re not there when a family member dies, your spirit will roam aimlessly and become a ghost,” Cho says in the haunting opening moments of EW’s exclusive preview of the project. “Why aren’t you at the hospital?” a woman’s voice asks. Cho replies: “He was never interested.”

Actor calls Columbus “a bit of an emerald city.” Here’s the interview: