The Projection Booth

There’s no legal way to stream the original Buzz, Mark Pellington’s 1990 MTV collage series — so he built a documentary out of what survives of it. This Is Buzz (2026), fresh off its Slamdance premiere and newly picked up by Starboard Entertainment for a summer theatrical run, revisits that 13-episode, genreless show, which folded William S. Burroughs, Jenny Holzer, Timothy Leary, and RuPaul into a one-airing-only collage that, Pellington argues, predicted how media actually works now. Mike talks with Pellington about licensing the surviving PAL masters back from MTV decades later, the pre-Avid tape editing that gave Buzz its frantic rhythm, how the show’s DNA resurfaces in U2’s Zoo TV Tour, and why — after Arlington Road (1999) and The Mothman Prophecies (2002) — he went looking for old footage instead of a script. The film is currently touring art-house screens, some with the multi-projector immersive setups Pellington built himself.

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What’s left to love once nature is gone? The Squirrel (2026) imagines a sterile future where animals have been engineered out of existence — until a lonely synthetic-pet designer finds the last living squirrel and breaks the rules to protect it. Now Finland’s Oscar entry, fresh off its international premiere at Fantastic Fest, it’s director Markus Lehmusruusu’s deadpan follow-up to Ricky Rapper and the Strongman (2019), Finland’s most-watched film that year. Mike talks with Lehmusruusu and lead actress Mimosa Willamo — who plays the government minder whose rigid world starts to crack — about shooting with four real, untrainable rescue squirrels on a sealed set, building the film’s antiseptic world with Berlin production designer Michael Randel, and a Japanese-speaking dog that wouldn’t take direction in any other language.

Visit the film’s official website.

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What happens when a couple’s vacation home movie catches the end of the world? Galicia! (2026) is the no-budget debut feature from married filmmaking duo Anna Maguire and Kyle Greenberg — a found-footage hybrid documentary shot on a real trip to help real strangers harvest grapes at a rural Spanish winery, with the apocalypse folded in after the fact. Fresh off its world premiere at the Downtown Festival in New York (Roxy Cinema, Oct. 13), ahead of a slot at the Santa Fe International Film Festival (Oct. 16), the film follows Maguire and Greenberg, plus new friends Maximiliano Betancourt, Paula Sartier Arán, and Sergio Freijo, through grape-stomping, lost luggage, and an unscripted shoot. Mike talks with the pair about building a “spiritual trilogy” out of real friendships, letting editor Saffron Weaver — once their teenage assistant-editing hire — shape raw footage into something stranger than a vacation video, and why they had to give the borrowed camera back.

Follow Galicia! on Instagram and visit the film’s official website.

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Teenage desire doesn’t announce itself — it hides behind dial-up logins, borrowed MSN identities, and the older girls you’d kill to become. That’s the world of Sid Bookman in Big Girls Don’t Cry (2026), writer-director Paloma Schneideman’s queer coming-of-age debut, set over one restless New Zealand summer in 2006. Mike talks with Schneideman and her two leads, Ani Palmer and Rain Spencer, about building that world: the MSN plotline that arrived a year into writing (the ending never changed), how Spencer landed Freya almost instantly off Good Girl Jane (2022) while Palmer’s audition tape stopped Schneideman cold ten seconds in, the grocery-store exercises that forged Sid and Freya’s onscreen bond, shooting a summer film through an actual tropical cyclone, and working with Noah Taylor, who kept improvising in character well off the clock as Sid’s hapless father.

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Director Shaun Paul Piccinino — a former stuntman and martial artist who cut his teeth on Jackie Chan documentaries — tells Mike White how Double Trouble came together as "Home Alone meets Ocean's Eleven": a Vegas heist comedy built around real-life sisters Madeleine and Violet McGraw, anchored by an Andrew Koji-led, Jackie-Chan-inspired kitchen brawl where even the lettuce gets used as a weapon.

Piccinino details the chaos of filming inside a live, working casino — sound so loud from slot machines and chatter that nobody expected to salvage any production audio, until the sound team proved them wrong — and the night 4,000 football fans unexpectedly descended on the casino floor mid-shoot for the climactic lobby fight, which his longtime cinematographer Brad Rushing called the hardest shoot day of his career. Add the limited hours mandated for the film's underage leads, and Double Trouble becomes a case study in improvising around a city that never actually sleeps.

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Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth