Arkansas

Alex Karpovsky's breakthrough 2006 film, The Hole Story, was part spoof, part dark comedy, part personal documentary. In it, a character, played by and named Alex Karpovsky, tries to solve the mystery of a hole opening in an otherwise frozen lake. In his sophomore effort, Woodpecker, premiering this month at SXSW, fact and fiction intermingle like snow and ice in a winter storm. This time the setting is swampy Arkansas, and the mystery revolves around rare birds. Karpovsky doesn't appear on the screen this time, but the muddling of reality and fiction is just as potent.