Personal Velocity

Rebecca Miller returns to Sundance (her award-winning feature debut, Angela, played the 1995 Film Festival) with an elegant and formally innovative work that is as intellectually stimulating as it is emotionally gripping. Miller deftly uses simultaneous narrative voices to delve deep into the personal stories of three women and achieves rich portraiture that is impossible with photography and rarely realized with the moving image.

As a teenager, Delia was a tough girl from a small New York town who had survived an abusive father and found power amongst her peers through her sexuality. How did she end up a battered wife and mother of three? How will she break the spell and regain her personal power? Greta is a sharp, spunky, Ivy League editor who, to spite the hated infidel ways of her father, has settled into a complacent relationship with a blond, blue-eyed graduate student. Sudden success leads her to confront her own issues with fidelity. How will she make sense of the life she has built for herself? Paula ran away from home only to find herself pregnant and in a relationship she doesn't want. When she narrowly escapes death's grip, she realizes it's an opportunity to change her life. What will she do with her second chance?

With incredibly powerful performances by Kyra Sedgwick, Parker Pose, and Fairuza Balk, Personal Velocity is a piercing insight into the underlying fabric of personality and how childhood traumas fuel the forces that determine a person's actions and decisions in adult life.