I Saw the TV Glow

When a lonely teenager is introduced by a classmate to a mysterious late-night TV show, the world within the show begins to feel more real than real life. Jane Schoenbrun’s evocative and uncanny story of suburban horrors and coming-of-age in the mid-1990s creates a foreboding feeling that unspools across decades before reaching a breaking point. Α meticulously crafted genre film that plays on the television shows that kept us awake at night during childhood, but that we couldn’t stop ourselves from watching. Α mind-bending exploration of both the perils of our culture’s obsession with nostalgia and the ways we find and make ourselves in the things we watch. Α glorious teen movie destined to be discussed in the same breath as classics such as The Craft and Donnie Darko. It’s a note-perfect evocation of the '90s, shot on gorgeously hypersaturated 35mm and fuzzed-out VHS, with an original soundtrack evocative of the Twin Peaks Roadhouse. It’s a multi-layered story that pops and entertains throughout, but provides a rich, thoughtful, utterly original meditation on identity, the unreliability of memory, and embracing what it means to be yourself. But most of all, I Saw the TV Glow heralds the arrival of not just one of the most singular American filmmakers of our times, but also an uncompromising new vision of queer and trans cinema.

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Direction: Jane Schoenbrun

Script: Jane Schoenbrun

Cinematography: Eric Yue

Editing: Sofi Marshall

Music: Alex G

Actors: Justice Smith, Brigette Lundy-Paine, Ian Foreman, Helena Howard, Lindsey Jordan

Production: Fruit Tree, Smudge Films, A24

Producers: Emma Stone, Dave McCary, Ali Herting, Sam Intili, Sarah Winshall

Production Design: Brandon Tonner-Connolly

Executive producer: Taylor Shung, Kevin Kelly, Len Blavatnik, Danny Cohen

Format: DCP

Color: Color

Production Country: USA

Production Year: 2024

Duration: 100'

Contact: Filmbankmedia

Awards/Distinctions: Audience Award – Champs-Élysées FF 2024, Seattle Film Critics Society Feature Film Award – Seattle IFF 2024, Best Production Design – Neuchâtel IFFF 2024

Jane Schoenbrun

Jane Schoenbrun is a non-binary filmmaker and writer dedicated to making and supporting personal, queer cinema. Their work includes I Saw the TV Glow, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, A Self-Induced Hallucination, and the punk-rock variety TV show The Eyeslicer. Their first novel is almost finished and their New Year’s Resolution is to get more comfortable with silence.

Filmography

2015 The School Is Watching (short doc)
2018 A Self-Induced Hallucination (doc)
2021 We’re All Going to the World’s Fair
2024 I Saw the TV Glow