Official Selection
2014 Sundance Film Festival

2015 Independent Spirit Award Nominee – Best First Feature, Best Cinematography, Kiehl’s Someone To Watch Award

Opens January 23 @ TIFF Bell Lightbox released by Video Services Corp

(Toronto) – Strange things are afoot in Bad City. A lonely vampire is stalking the town’s most unsavory inhabitants. But when boy meets girl in A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, an unusual love story begins to blossom…blood red.

The title character, The Girl (Sheila Vand, Argo, State of Affairs), wears a chador and skateboards slowly through the nighttime streets of an Iranian ghost town called Bad City, that – but for a ditch full of corpses – could be any industrial wasteland (and is actually a nod to the towns of Bakersfield, California and Margate, England where the filmmaker grew up).

The Girl meets Arash (Arash Marandi) the human who touches her heart after he suffers a bad reaction to Ecstasy at a licentious costume party. He is dressed as Dracula when they meet. The Girl also encounters The Gambler, The Prostitute, The Pimp and The Rich Girl, who interact in a life-and-death way with her – archetypes Amirpour was inspired to create by Spaghetti Westerns.

The result is a unique, wry and moving experience in starkly-lit black-and-white that won over audiences at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival and was recently nominated for three 2015 Independent Spirit Awards.

A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night sprang from a short film of the same name and inspired the filmmaker to create an evolving backstory for The Girl. “I had to answer the questions of who this Vampire was and is,” Amirpour says. “And suddenly I had hundreds of years of stories in my hands. The movie is just a fraction of time in her existence.” On a creative roll, she concurrently released a graphic novel called Death Is The Answer, produced by RADCO Comics.

A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night also owes a debt to the novels of Anne Rice, which Amirpour says she devoured as a child. “Anne Rice and romance novels were great inspirations for the movie,” she adds. “Rice’s Vampire Lestat is so lonely, which is really the essence of romance. Vampire stories provide an existential vantage-point for the human experience.”