Kit Zauhar's Indie Drama Film 'This Closeness' Sets Release Date

Factory 25 revealed a new theatrical trailer for writer/director/star Kit Zauhar’s sophomore feature film This Closeness, also starring Zauhar along with Zane Pais (Margot at the Wedding, Starz’s Three Women) and Ian Edlund (Vimeo Staff Picks Shorts “Mixtape Marauders” and “The Claw”). Actress and singer Jessie Pinnick (Princess Cyd) and multimedia artist Kate Williams round out the cast.

Release Date

Directed by Kit Zauher, This Closeness world premiered at the 2023 SXSW Film Festival and will begin its theatrical run at the IFC Center in New York City on June 7, with further engagements to be announced and a worldwide digital release with MUBI on July 3.

Synopsis

An exquisite layering of genres and emotional complexities This Closeness peers at the lives of three mid-20s young adults as tensions rise when a couple stays at the home of a reclusive host while in Philadelphia for a school reunion. The trio enters into an intimate battle to gain and regain territory over the course of a weekend. A meditation on connection and isolation in the modern world, the film offers an emotionally raw and honest dissection of how intimacy and vulnerability can be weaponized, and how masculinity within people of all genders can erode trust and understanding.

Zauhar, motivated by her experiences and identity as a young bi-racial woman in New York City, boldly weaves the themes and nuance of race relations across her work alongside reoccurring motifs of intimacy and sexual desire.

“This film is a meditation on connection and isolation, how intimacy and vulnerability can be weaponized, and how masculinity within people of all genders can erode trust and understanding. As a bi-racial woman, I am always motivated to weave race relations into my film. In this project, the white male gaze and the fetishization of Asian women are present as a specter in conversations, intimate interactions, and sexual desires. This film takes an ironic and unflinching look at many current milieus happening outside of the walls of this story’s apartment, and how intricate social dynamics inform or evade the most private parts of our character’s lives.” – director Kit Zauher.