EXCLUSIVE: Grasshopper Film has acquired North American distribution rights to the documentary Little, Big, and Far ahead of its world premiere at the New York Film Festival.
The film from award-winning director Jem Cohen will bow on Saturday evening as the Centerpiece selection of NYFF’s Currents section.
“Jem Cohen brings the same meditative elegance and intellectual curiosity he did to Museum Hours (2012) with his stargazing new feature, again using the cinematic form to patiently interrogate ways of seeing and being,” the festival writes in its program. “The principal subject of Cohen’s film is an Austrian astronomer named Karl who has been re-evaluating his work and life after turning 70, and who travels to a mountaintop on a Greek island in search of the darkest sky against which to view the cosmos. Yet the real matter of the singular Little, Big, and Far—whose title refers to the three concepts Karl and his physicist wife believe are at the core of their work—is as vast as the universe itself, a reckoning with scientific truth at a moment of humanity’s existential crisis.”
Grasshopper Film plans a theatrical release for Little, Big, and Far in early 2025. Along with Museum Hours, Cohen’s credits include the documentaries Counting (2015) and Benjamin Smoke (2000), and the drama Chain (2004).
“This sister film to Museum Hours is drawn from the same belief, that character, place, story, and ideas can exist on an even playing field in a film that slips seamlessly between fiction and non-fiction,” Cohen said in a statement. “The new film is resolutely down-to-earth and otherworldly; contemplative, angry, humorous and beautiful. I need to work with people who believe there’s a place for such things— and that audiences may even be hungry for them. Ryan Krivoshey [founder of Grasshopper Film] took that chance with my last films, and I’m honored to once again have him at the helm, getting the work out to the people.”
‘Little, Big, and Far’
Grasshopper Film
Krivoshey commented, “Little, Big, and Far is an extraordinary work from a singular voice in American cinema. Unlike much of what currently fills theaters and flashes across screens, it is refreshingly personal, mysterious and deeply curious, and utterly transfixing— it is a Jem Cohen film. I was delighted to release Museum Hours more than ten years ago and have felt the same with every one of Jem’s films since then. I can’t wait for audiences to discover his latest feature and experience something, well, out of this world.”
Little, Big, And Far is written and directed by Jem Cohen. Produced by Paolo Calamita (Little Magnet Films) and Jem Cohen (Gravity Hill). Main creative advisor is Guy Picciotto. Executive producers are Scott Macaulay, Ryan Krivoshey, David Frankel, Michael Stipe, and Patti Smith.
Grasshopper Film
“Dedicated to the release of acclaimed and award-winning independent cinema, Grasshopper Film is one of the most vital distributors working today,” notes a release. “With a library of over 400 titles, featuring Academy Award winners and nominees, prize-winners from major film festivals, and work from leading US and international directors, the company has been hailed as an ‘estimable new label’ by The New York Times, ‘a gateway to some superb Cinema’ by the Los Angeles Times, and ‘one of the most artistically daring of distributors’ by The New Yorker.”
Previous releases included Kleber Mendonca Filho’s Pictures of Ghosts, Albert Serra’s Pacifiction, Alain Gomis’ Rewind and Play, Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica and Leviathan, Brett Story’s The Hottest August, and Feras Fayyad’s Academy Award nominated Last Men In Aleppo. Upcoming releases include Oksana Karpovych’s Intercepted and Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan’s Nocturnes.
Before founding Grasshopper Film, Krivoshey worked at Icarus Films and Film Forum. His first job was at a now-defunct NYC video store, Kim’s Underground, itself the subject of a recent documentary directed by David Redmon and Ashley Sabin.