I met filmmaker Wendy McColm volunteering at the Oak Cliff Film Festival in 2018 where they screened her debut, Birds Without Feathers. Wisely hanging around on her social media, I got the opportunity a few years later to consult on various edits of her next film, Fuzzy Head, which, after a stop-and-start production over the course of the pandemic, brought her back to Dallas to screen at the 2023 Oak Cliff Film Festival and is finally heading to streaming services this Tuesday, Oct. 24.
Fuzzy Head, a highly Lynchian voyage into the psyche, is one of the riskiest films I’ve ever seen. McColm, who writes, directs, edits, produces, color-corrects and designs sound, also stars as Marla, a young woman who flees into the desert after she may or may not have killed her abusive mother. The self-suspecting murder mystery plays out over a broken timeline and fantasy sequences as Marla is propelled through her guilt and the lingering self-blame from her childhood.
I’m enraptured every time I see it, and the day of its Oak Cliff premier, I find myself going over prior versions in the morning before I leave for the theater, but there are still new details to enjoy when I get to see the final cut on the big screen. McColm hovers by the stairs going in and out of the theater, seemingly wanting to both see and not see a film that is personal, often too personal, now playing for a packed house of more than 100 strangers. Late in the evening, after the headlining restoration of 1925’s The Lost World lets out, McColm and I steal away to the back of the empty Texas Theatre, where I talk with her about the emotion and memory driving the film.
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