WFF 2025: Debut, or, Objects of the Field of Debris as Currently Catalogued
Preview coverage of the 2025 Wisconsin Film Festival begins with a look at Julian Castronovo's excellent experimental feature, a "Wisconsin's Own" highlight.
Greetings, MTWZaniacs.
This week’s newsletter is the first installment in MTWZ’s preview coverage of the 2025 Wisconsin Film Festival (WFF). The festival runs April 3 to 10 across various venues in Madison. You may browse the lovely film guide and buy tickets to screenings here.
Next week, I plan to cover multiple WFF titles in the form of short capsules. For today, however, I wanted to devote more time to a terrific experimental narrative feature that world-premiered at the Rotterdam Film Festival only last month. It also happens to be a “Wisconsin’s Own” selection, owing to the filmmaker’s roots in the state. This slate of WFF programming is near and dear to my heart, as I helped program it between 2019-2020 and in 2022 served as a jury member for its “Golden Badger Award.” I have seen a lot of brilliant “Wisconsin’s Own” selections over the years, and the film discussed below is one of the very best.
I will keep this post public in perpetuity, but I intend to paywall the rest of my WFF coverage after the fest. Subscribe for free below to ensure you don’t miss out on all future festival coverage and the vast majority of MTWZ newsletters!
Debut, or, Objects of the Field of Debris as Currently Catalogued (dir. Julian Castronovo, 2025)
Screening April 5, 6:15 pm, Chazen Museum of Art (Buy tickets via Eventive here)
WFF’s “Wisconsin’s Own” slate has a proud tradition of championing local experimental work, usually in the form of a dedicated shorts block. This year’s “Wisconsin’s Own Experimental Shorts” program (link here) carries on this tradition with an April 4 screening promising new work by Bill Bedford, Sarah Ballard, and other adventurous, Wisconsin-connected filmmakers.
At the same time, Wisconsin’s Own seldom includes an avant-garde feature. One can speculate as to the various practical and structural reasons why this is so. Having helped program this slate myself back in 2019 and 2020, however, I can attest that Wisconsin’s Own programmers tend not be drowning in feature-length submissions of this sort, as opposed to documentary or narrative titles. Rarer still does a film present itself that is both genuinely outside-the-box and worthy of headlining a ticket on its own.
For this reason alone, Wisconsin native Julian Castronovo’s 77-minute, longwindedly titled Debut, or, Objects of the Field of Debris as Currently Catalogued should command your attention. Screening alongside Malena Szlam’s 2024 short Archipelago of Earthen Bones — To Bunya on April 5, Debut conforms with contemporary avant-garde practice in its fusion of fiction and nonfiction modes, but it does so in exciting, intuitive, and self-evidently accomplished ways. Don’t take my word for it: It premiered last month at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and soon after screened at MoMA’s prestigious Doc Fortnight. Not bad for a twentysomething who got his start screening student shorts (Hannah’s Video, WFF 2021; Noise, WFF 2023) at the Wisconsin Film Festival!
Part metafictional mystery and part hyperlinked essay film, Debut “stars” Castronovo as a fictionalized version of himself (above) investigating a trail of art forgery. The precipitating event involves the real-life fraud case of art dealer Ely Sakhai, who “Castronovo” claims is his landlord. His inquiries lead to cryptic communications with a Chinese art forger named Fawn Ma and mounting paranoia that he himself is being watched. While this scenario on its own does not break new ground, as anyone acquainted with late 20th century literature or just Eyes Wide Shut could attest, Debut adopts a more dejected than cynical tone by alternating between two voiceover tracks, one belonging to an omniscient female narrator and the other to the “Castronovo” stand-in. The latter’s perspective starts atomized and only gets more out-of-depth and self-effacing as it proceeds, which I suppose marks Debut as a Gen Z text.
If this main narrative thread proves (IRL) Castronovo’s ability to spin a good yarn, then Debut’s film-within-a-film B-plot demonstrates a knack for satire. In the course of investigating Fawn Ma, the “Castronovo” character begins a flat-out hilarious correspondence with a budding independent film producer who sees potential in turning this material into a true crime project that he can shop around town. The producer only introduces himself after discovering the filmmaker’s forged business cards to indie film companies like A24, MUBI, and Sony Pictures Classics, shown on-screen with fake job titles like “Julian Castronovo - Dust Collector.” Nominally calling “Castronovo” to reprimand him, the producer quickly confesses his low industry status and turns the call into a pitch meeting. The humor here accords with the film’s general theme that, when you’re on the outside looking in, the powers that be aren’t the ones bothering to respond.
Produced for $900, this self-described “laptop movie” is narrative in concept—as the preceding summary hopefully makes clear—but avant-garde in its audiovisual choices and guiding sensibility. Instead of anything resembling classical coverage, the image track is replete with scanned documents, front-facing camera footage, digital avatars, and oddly cropped/zoomed-in views of random internet ephemera, ranging from “endless runner” mobile games to that viral video of the fitness instructor exercising in front of the 2021 Myanmar military coup. Much of the slim budget reportedly went to paying the aforementioned voiceover actor, who narrates stretches of the film in a monotone, rapid cadence. Naturally, a shape-shifting experimental effort of this sort won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but—as someone with limited patience for essay films by young filmmakers—I was honestly surprised by how rarely my attention flagged.
I would attribute much of Debut’s success to the fact that it tells a well-written and largely intelligible story. In his recent interview with Tone Glow (embedded Substack link below), Castronovo (no air quotes) discussed his intentions to more or less conform to the conventions of the mystery genre:
I wanted so badly for it to work on a purely narrative level. … I think I would find a film of pure formal experimentation to be unwatchable if it was not grounded in narrative, especially one of this length. You could make a very short film of image experiments, but to make an experimental film of this length, there has to be something familiar as a spine.
But Debut still trades in the dominant currency of avant-garde cinema, through some spectacular and original image-making. For Filmmaker Magazine, Vadim Rizov has already described the opening shot (glimpsed atop this section) in all its vivid, split-screen detail. The film’s use of miniatures (see above) is fleeting but inspired; this motif reminds me of a similar talent shared by Julian’s sister Maya Castronovo, whose diaromic short film Laura (WFF 2019) was a consensus favorite of the Wisconsin’s Own programming team when I served years ago. Finally, Debut’s last shot (not pictured here) is flat-out terrific, in that it provides something resembling narrative closure through warped and singular aesthetic means. I’ll tease it only by saying it reminded me of the ending of Hong Sang-soo’s In Water (2023),1 in finding poetry at the limits of vision.
Coming up: No new “The Latest” column this week—I haven’t even seen Black Bag yet. Maybe next week. Expect more WFF preview coverage then, as well. 😌
I know at least three of my subscribers have seen this / the comparison stays in!