City Beat: New Dawn for Cincinnati Film Festival
Leland Orser’s Morning is the type of film that often falls through the cracks in today’s depressed distribution landscape: a small, challenging passion project that makes no concessions to commercial cinema. It needs to find an audience via artist-nurturing outlets like the Cincinnati Film Festival, where Morning makes its regional premiere at 9 p.m. Friday at the Esquire Theatre.
Orser, a longtime character actor who’s appeared in everything from Se7en and Saving Private Ryan to 24 and ER, makes his feature-length filmmaking debut with Morning, which follows Mark (Orser) and Alice Munroe (played by Orser’s real-life wife Jeanne Tripplehorn) as they struggle to deal with the accidental death of their young son. Set over the four days immediately following the tragedy, the grief-stricken couple reacts in ways both similar and dichotomous, expected and unexpected.
