Chosen as the opening film for this years Raindance Film Festival, Mike Cahills Another Earth, made

on a meagre $150, 000, has already been bestowed with the Special Jury Prize and the Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize at Januarys Sundance Film Festival. Utilising two distinct genres - one serving as the backdrop for another along with exquisite cinematography, Cahill creates an inimitable cinematic space that allows for the internalised emotions of the characters to be vividly expressed within a framework that is blessed with a wonderfully empathic score from Brooklyn based (but UK born!) Fall on Your Sword who help to provide a feeling of density and mass to the films existential and humanist evocation. Rhoda Williams (Brit Marling: Sound of My Voice) is a bright young woman who has just been accepted into MITs Astrophysics program she aspires to explore the cosmos. A brilliant composer, John Burroughs (William Mapother: Lost), has just reached the pinnacle of his profession and is about to have a second child. On the eve of the discovery of a duplicate earth, tragedy strikes and irrevocably entwines their lives forever. While, this catastrophic event is a catalyst of sorts for the films narrative the films focus is largely on the human mind and how it deals with the mistakes we make, and our enduring need to put right what went wrong. The power of the film lies in the joint efforts of its multi-talented director, Mike Cahill, and the equally brilliant Brit Marling, who together have woven a narrative that probes deep to convey something enduringly human, and is at once both heart rendering and intriguing. The story is accompanied by a freed up and jarring style of filmmaking that adds depth to the films tension and atmosphere by utilising jump cuts and a complicated sound-scape to remind the audience of the films grounding within a sci-fi realm. Its location is as bleak and as cold as Debra Graniks Winters Bone, and as a result offers an externalised progression of the films protagonists and their emotions. In addition, the score provided by Fall on Your Sword decorates Another Earth with a wide ranging palette of sounds that not only helps to convey the emotions of the characters but also the strange situation that is beginning to unfold by utilising sound in an acousmatic manner which creates further feelings of displacement and isolation. The performances of Marling as Rhoda and Mapother as John are outstanding and make Another Earth a compelling and unforgettable watch. Out of the two, Mapother is the most experienced with a fairly extensive CV that includes a lot of work in television, including a recurring appearance as Ethan Rom in JJ Abrams Lost and appearances in Prison Break, yet both actors deliver genuinely gripping performances that manage to tap into a human place, with Marlings portrayal of Rhoda one that will be particularly memorable. The films director, Mike Cahill has an almost intrinsic awareness of human emotion as the film is shot and edited (again, both by Cahill) in a manner that emphasises the deeply internalised emotions of its key characters so effectively. He utilises the depth and space in each frame to convey both the progression of his characters mindsets and also the relationship that exists between them in a fashion that is fresh and unique in essence it is as though he is narrating with his camera. Blessed with his own talents and accompanied by the obvious abilities of Brit Marling as co-writer and protagonist,

Another Earth is a genuine force that resonates wonderfully with our continuous quest to figure out our place in the world.