Show Notes
When their mother goes unresponsive, Anna (Anna Sargent) calls for help and no one quite listens. Writer-director Liz Sargent built Take Me Home (2026) around her own sister, a woman with a cognitive disability, and made her the hero instead of the burden. Mike talks with Sargent as the Sundance Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award winner opens in theaters via Willa.
Sargent traces her path from modern dance and experimental theater to a Mike Figgis-mentored short shot days before she met her biological mother in Korea. She explains how the Take Me Home short went from diary entry to Sundance and the White House, why structured improv gave Anna ownership of every line, and how Emily (Ali Ahn) and parents Bob (Victor Slezak) and Joan (Marceline Hugot) grew beyond the real family. Plus: Anna kicking her sister out of press junkets, and a Long Duk Dong pitch born mid-interview.
Learn more at takemehomefilm.com and follow @take_me_home_film and @annasargentofficial.
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth--5513239/support.
Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth
More from The Projection Booth
What if detention were group therapy? Detention (2026), a quirky teen comedy from Washington State's Bainbridge Island, swaps the usual punishment for something harder: a room of kids made to talk about what is really happening behind closed doors. Writer-director Emma Cameron, who co-directed with her husband Mark Cameron and also plays the sleep-deprived Dr. Messerschmitt, joins Mike after the film's Pasadena International Film Festival screening and a summer theatrical run, just as it arrives on Amazon Prime and Apple TV. She traces the idea to The Breakfast Club (1985) and a job on a school mental-health commercial, explains why she cast 90 percent of the film in Washington, how she recast a major role two weeks before shooting, and how two nights of magic-hour light captured the final scene at the water's edge.
A body missing for 36 years turns up at a gruesome crime scene, and the daughter who goes looking learns her father's past is much worse than she thought. The Cycle (2026), a Fantastic Fest world premiere starring Deborah Ann Woll and Jeffrey Donovan, comes from Jordan Downey, the filmmaker behind The Head Hunter (2018). Stephen King has already called it special, and it arrives on Shudder October 23.
A bus explodes in downtown Hong Kong on Valentine's Day, and the trail of wreckage leads to two young men nobody was watching. We're Nothing at All (2026), a festival drama that has played Hong Kong and Udine's Far East Film Festival, intercuts a forensic investigation with the love story and desperation of a gay couple pushed toward disaster by poverty. Herman Yau, the Hong Kong veteran behind Taxi Hunter (1993), directs.
In 1988, a Soviet underground rock hero flew west to record an album for CBS, and Michael Apted's cameras went with him. The Long Way Home (1989) follows Boris Grebenshchikov and his band Aquarium from studio sessions in New York and Montreal back to a Leningrad where glasnost was still a hope, with Dave Stewart, Annie Lennox, Chrissie Hynde, and Crosby, Stills and Nash along for the ride. Now it's back: a 4K remaster built from the only surviving 16mm print premiered at the Museum of Modern Art in January 2026, with a new epilogue on Grebenshchikov's exile.
A man comes home from an alien abduction to find a tenant living in his house. Into the Sky (2026), a Fantastic Fest world premiere starring Sam Richardson, Sofia Black-D'Elia, and David Cross, pairs that premise with classic rom-com bones: the meet-cute, the estranged spouse, the big wedding. Drew Mylrea and Evan Wolf Buxbaum make their feature directing debut with an idea a decade in the making.