Finally, time to review one more from the Phoenix Film Festival!  Last year, I reviewed quite a few films from the festival, but I think this year I’ll just pick the best one from each day.  Except Saturday, there were two I really liked, so I might just review both of them.  The first of those two is a movie called Listening.  Listening was the first film I saw on Saturday, and probably my favorite.  It’s also probably my favorite out of all the films I saw at the entire festival, honestly.  I just really liked it.

Listening is about these two college students, Ryan and David, who have been working on a project to try to listen to and decode human thought.  They meet another student, Jordan, who joins the project and has some ideas that put a whole new twist on it – humans listening directly to each other’s thoughts instead of using a computer to decode them.  Listening is the story of what happens when their project starts to take off.

Listening really has it all.  It’s a very intelligent movie, but not so intelligent that the average movie-goer can’t follow it.  The premise may sound like sci-fi, and it basically is, but the film also has touches of comedy, romance, and drama as well.  It really was just a very interesting and entertaining feature.  It covers quite a bit of territory, but never strays from the main premise of the power of telepathy.

I’m never too disappointed in most of the films I see at the Phoenix Film Festival, and in general, they are all a step above most of the ones I find in mainstream movie theaters.  Listening was definitely one of those films.  With deep and interesting characters that you end up caring about, it takes you into their personal lives alongside the project they are working on.

Listening is also not a predictable film, at least it wasn’t to me.  One complaint I had about a couple of the films I saw this weekend was that they followed patterns that had just been done before and weren’t original enough.  Listening definitely broke the mold.  The premise may have been thought of before, but I’ve not seen it done like this, and it was a very enjoyable adventure to witness, one I would highly recommend if you get the chance to see it.