Tyler Taormina, director of Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point: ‘I find America’s culture of separation very frustrating’.

• Michael Cera, Sawyer Spielberg and Francesca Scorsese star in this ensemble film about the Christmas reunion of a suburban American family.

Valladolid, 20 October 2024. Tyler Taormina, an icon of American independent cinema, to whom the 69th edition of SEMINCI pays particular attention, has landed today in the Official Section to present his latest film, Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, a family drama that portrays the Blasanos, an Italian-American family who get together to celebrate what will probably be their last Christmas together.

The film portrays a family from the suburbs, those residential suburbs characteristic of the United States that Taormina has also approached in his previous works: ‘The suburbs are built on alienation, on supremacy, on all these things that are now really becoming a real blight on the nation. As for my generation, a lot of us left the suburbs and went to the cities; we are the gentrifiers of the world’.

Tyler Taormina has expressed his concern about the current situation in the United States: ‘I find a lot of frustration in all this separation that’s going on in my society, in my culture. And I think, in this current moment of alienation, which is very common in America, my natural state is to connect with people, which is not easy and which is in all these films.

The filmmaker and his co-screenwriter Eric Berger tackled the writing of this choral tale by delving into how each generation has a different reaction to the family as a unit. And they set the plot in the quintessential family moment, Christmas, a symbolic moment. ‘There is a kind of feeling, which happens with Christmas films, where the characters are called to have a kind of existential awakening. And I think that’s very important for this film,’ said Tyler Taormina. According to the director, this film and one of his previous works, Harper’s Comet (2022), which premiered at the 67th edition of SEMINCI in the Time of History section, share being ecosystem films: ‘They require a large cast to get an overall picture of how different people relate to certain cultural rituals’.

Classic American cinema has dwelt on family rituals such as Christmas, something that resonates strongly in Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point: ‘I’m very interested in classic Hollywood, a time when the camera was a loving tool to demonstrate a real love of capturing images. It’s a kind of practice that in America is not being adopted as much as it used to be, and it’s something that saddens me’.

Commenting on the film’s visual references, Taormina said, ‘I think a lot of Carson Lund’s (his cinematographer, who is also presenting his film Eephus this year in the Meeting Point section) work was to bring in a practice from the golden age of Hollywood, when light was used in an abnormal and artificial amount to get the colours just right. We also relied a lot on the style of these biscuit tins that are sold in the US, which have a bit of a cheesy decoration, and we really liked that’.

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