Chicago-Made Award-Winning Feature ‘Monuments’ Finally Gets Its Hometown Premiere
When Producer Angie Gaffney and Writer/Director Jack C. Newell set out on their first collaboration, MONUMENTS, they set out to make a big movie for big screens. The film was shot in and around Chicago, as well as Boulder, Colorado, in the fall of 2018 and spring of 2019. The film premiered at the Nashville Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award – but by then the whole world was locked down because of COVID restrictions.
The film then experimented with a virtual-only theatrical release plan that exhibitors and distributors were trying at the time. The upside was that people nationwide got to see the film; the downside was that they saw it on their laptops, phones, and TV screens.
The acclaimed indie is now receiving its proper hometown theatrical premiere, at Chicago’s historic Music Box Theater. Both screenings – Saturday, June 7th at 2:00 pm CST and Wednesday, June 11th at 7:00 pm – will feature a post-film Q&A with Newell and members of the filmmaking team. Click here for your tickets to the highly anticipated event.
Says Producer Angie Gaffney to SCREEN, “The adventure that was the making of MONUMENTS is comparable only to the characters’ journeys in the film itself. Our fiercely dedicated, Chicago-based crew showed up consistently despite long production hours and many far-away locations. COVID then added its own chapter to our adventure story, and so, like any good explorer, we adapted. At long last, we are thrilled to bring this home to the big screen and can’t wait to celebrate with the community that made it possible.”
Variety praised MONUMENTS as a “dippily surreal existential comedy — imagine Quentin Dupieux engineering a head-on collision between “Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia” and “Little Miss Sunshine” — feels like it’s born of the exact middle ground between the big-budget escapist mainstream and the hardcore arthouse “coasts” of American cinematic output.”
Monuments tells the story of Ted (David Sullivan) a grieving widower who sidesteps grief, loss, and familial dysfunction when he steals his wife Laura’s ashes (Marguerite Moreau) and sets off on an impulsive odyssey through America’s heartland to find something he’d lost long before her death.
Here’s a look at the trailer for the indie feature…
Producer/Director Jack C. Newell goes on to share with SCREEN, “We made this film to be seen in cinemas and had a theatrical run set up before COVID forced it to be virtual-only. So, to get the chance to share the film – as intended – is very exciting and gratifying for the whole team. The years of hard work that everyone who worked on this film put into it can finally be seen in the form that we intended – big picture, big sound – monumental even, at The Music Box.”
Click here for your tickets to the highly anticipated event.
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