“Palindrome” is Cleaning Up Festival Awards

Theaters are closed, movies delayed, and access to press screenings are limited to streaming. There’s no better time to highlight smaller films — amazing movies without the big-studio marketing budget that makes it harder for you to find. Discover a new film festival darling and support new, emerging, and independent filmmakers. Sheltering in place doesn’t need to stop you from your weekend evening escape to the movies. Follow the flurry of upcoming reviews on Twitter, or find all my reviews for movies you can stream from right at home. A British independent film by Marcus Flemmings, Palindrome made a splash at London Independent Film Festival 2020. It’s racked up 17 film festival awards so far with its hook based on a story following the format of a palindrome, being the same whether told forward or backward. At worst, such a story could prove an empty gimmick, a quirky concept that makes for a better idea than actual story. At best — at least in my cinematic memory — a story could land with the cultural resonance of Chris Nolan’s 2001 movie, Momento, a film that both hooked with a unique idea of telling a story backwards and executed with remarkable strength. Palindrome follows Fred, a young Black man in modern Britain being terrorized in what can only be described as an empty mental facility, save for him and his two tormentors. We toggle between his real-life experience portrayed in color, and the goings on of his psyche shown in black and white. Both are bleak, with …