Altered states of cinema. Josephine Decker receives the Indie Star Award

Decker knows the road to New Horizons Cinema well. In 2014, she attended the 14th New Horizons with her debut, Butter on the Latch. That fall, her second film, Thou Wast Mild and Lovely, had its Polish premiere at the 5th American Film Festival. Four years later, we screened Madeline’s Madeline at the 18th New Horizons in the Third Eye: Girlhood section. In 2019, the film returned as part of the Canon—a selection through which the 10th American Film Festival looked back on its first decade with titles that had helped shape the event. Just one year later, we brought Shirley to the AFF straight from Berlin. We’ve kept the door unlatched for Decker ever since—and intend to keep it that way.

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Without GPS

Before making her narrative feature debut, Decker directed documentaries and acted in films by filmmakers associated with mumblecore, including Joe Swanberg, who later appeared in Thou Wast Mild and Lovely. She is also a performance artist. In 2010, Marina Abramović spent several months sitting across from a succession of visitors at New York’s MoMA. On the final day of the performance, Decker—who had waited 31 hours for her turn—took the seat opposite Abramović and removed her dress. It was her way of thanking the artist and baring herself before Abramović, just as Abramović had spent years baring herself to audiences. Security escorted Decker from the museum; the scene appears in the documentary Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present.

Her background in documentary filmmaking shaped an approach she later described in an interview with the Sundance Institute: shoot on a shoestring and find the film in the editing room. For her, the screenplay is merely a point of departure. The course is charted by what happens with the actors on set and what she later discovers in the edit. Decker returns to the journey metaphor in an interview with Women and Hollywood, describing the mind as “a constantly fickle, ever-changing guide.”

A Stable Marriage, dir. Josephine Decker

Her films themselves, however, reveal the most about her. Which ones will you see in Wrocław?

States on the map, states of mind

The retrospective opens with two early films in which Decker takes her camera beyond the city. In Butter on the Latch, Sarah leaves New York after a breakup and travels to a Balkan music festival in the woods of Mendocino, California. Somewhere along the way, the improvised, microbudget drama veers into horror, hovering between waking life and dreams. In Thou Wast Mild and Lovely, a ballad inspired by the fiction of John Steinbeck, Akin (Joe Swanberg) arrives at a Kentucky farm for seasonal work. The attraction that develops between him and Sarah, the farmer’s daughter, takes an increasingly unsettling turn.

Butter on the Latch, dir. Josephine Decker

In the next two films, art begins to feed on life. In Madeline’s Madeline, the director of a New York physical theater troupe (Molly Parker) draws the private life of teenage Madeline—and her relationship with her overprotective mother (Miranda July)—into a production. Madeline is played by Helena Howard, whom Decker discovered at a school acting competition when Howard was fifteen. The film opens with the words, “The emotions you are having are not your own. They are someone else’s.” IndieWire’s David Ehrlich called it “one of the boldest and most invigorating American films of the 21st century.” In Shirley, Elisabeth Moss plays Shirley Jackson, author of The Haunting of Hill House. The writer and her husband (Michael Stuhlbarg), a professor at Vermont’s Bennington College, welcome a young married couple into their home. Shirley soon begins treating her new houseguest as material for her next novel. The film was produced by Christine Vachon, herself an Indie Star Award recipient, and earned Decker the U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Award for Auteur Filmmaking at Sundance.

Madeline’s Madeline, dir. Josephine Decker

In Chasing Summer, the latest film and centerpiece of the retrospective, Decker shifts gears with a romantic comedy full of sex jokes and nostalgia for the 2000s. Jamie (Iliza Shlesinger, who also wrote the screenplay) works in disaster relief, traveling from one natural disaster to the next. When her partner leaves her for a younger woman and she loses her job, she returns to her Texas hometown after twenty years away. She moves back in with her parents (Megan Mullally and Jeff Perry) and takes a job maintaining a run-down roller rink. Her former boyfriend is still around, too. Decker, who also grew up in Texas, told the Sundance Institute that “puberty and middle age have a lot in common.” Her turn toward comedy divided critics: IndieWire declared that the Josephine Decker we once knew was gone, while Screen Daily hailed the film as a “smart, sexy Texas-set crowdpleaser.” Before choosing sides, bear in mind that Decker performs with a clown troupe in Los Angeles.

Chasing Summer, dir. Josephine Decker

The final stop on this year’s route is the subversive eight-minute short A Stable Marriage, which premiered at SXSW.

The retrospective is curated by Adriana Prodeus.

The program includes:

• Butter on the Latch (2013)

• Thou Wast Mild and Lovely (2014)

• Madeline’s Madeline (2018)

• Shirley (2020)

• Chasing Summer (2026)

• A Stable Marriage (2026)

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Presented by the TAURON American Film Festival, the Indie Star Award honors acclaimed independent filmmakers. Previous recipients include Agnès Varda, Todd Solondz, John Waters, Nina Menkes, and Jesse Eisenberg. In 2025, the award went to Susan Seidelman and Alexandre O. Philippe.

Join us for the 17th TAURON American Film Festival, taking place November 17–22, 2026, at New Horizons Cinema in Wrocław. The online edition will be available on the New Horizons VOD platform from November 17 to December 6. Passes, as well as media and industry accreditations are available through October 31.

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