SURVIVAL SKILLS
This subversive, postmodern satire finds an upstanding cop in a police-training VHS beginning to overstep his jurisdiction when confronted with the thin blue line.
Eager to serve and protect his community on his first day on the job, Middletown police cadet Jim Williams (outstanding Vayu O’Donnell) is the perfect recruit in a classic 1980s police training video called SURVIVAL SKILLS. Assisted by the video’s law-and-order-loving narrator (Hollywood legend Stacy Keach), Jim almost whistles his way through his first morning at the precinct despite the jaded grumblings of his assigned partner, Officer Allison Lohman (Ericka Kreutz). When an answered call for a domestic dispute ends with questionable results, the usually chipper Jim begins to doubt the techniques instilled during his weeks of training. Despite protests from the increasingly irritated narrator, Jim begins to take matters into his own hands and discovers that determining justice is never absolute. A timely, genre-bending, and frequently hilarious work, Quinn Armstrong’s debut feature might begin as a send-up of dated workforce training videos, but through its VHS haze reveals itself to be a complex character study brimming with pathos.
CAST: Vayu O’Donnell, Stacy Keach, Spencer Garrett, Ericka Kreutz
In Competition: First Feature Award
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