Trona by David Nordstrom

David Fenster s feature debut tells the loopy story of a depressed businessman who inexplicably finds himself in the middle of the desert, gets nearly all his clothes stolen by a passer-by and eventually installs himself as the overseer of an abandoned junkyard paradise. Defiantly minimalist, David Fenster s TRONA marks a striking feature debut by a filmmaker with a taste for moribund humor and the ironies of the American Dream. Tracking the so-called Man with the Mustache from an innocuous business trip to a bizarre detour into a totally new life in the California desert, Fenster s film intrigues us with its use of big physical space and bigger narrative gaps. Trona itself, once a company town and always one of the strangest California communities, has never been better documented.