Joe Swanberg’s excruciatingly intimate portrait of post-collegiate relationships, “Kissing on the Mouth,” plays the Montreal World Film Festival Sept. 1-3 ahead of its local debut at the Chicago International Film Festival this October.
In the six months since his feature’s South by Southwest premiere, the 24-year-old filmmaker has gotten a crash course in the battle that is selling a challenging, low-budget project in a crowded and skittish marketplace.
“Kissing on the Mouth” takes a raw and unflinching look at its characters’ emotions and at their bodies. “Anybody who’s seeing the film most likely has had sex and has seen a naked body,” Swanberg explained.
“We shouldn’t be afraid to be as realistic and straightforward as possible. We wanted to shoot sex scenes in the same way that we’d shoot dialogue scenes. The dialogue was way more explicit and intense than the sex, in a lot of regards.”
