Rob Tregenza’s FAST at The Museum of Modern Art

The Museum of Modern Art announces a film series, Rob Tregenza's FAST, from August 12–18, 2026.

Rob Tregenza has worked at the leading edge of American independent cinema since his 1988 debut Talking to Strangers, a film built entirely from extended single-take sequences shot in nine locations across the city of Baltimore. His subsequent films—including Inside/Out (1997), Gavagai (2016), and The Fishing Place (2024)—constitute a body of work defined less by narrative than by the physical weight of recorded reality. Largely self-financed and operating outside the festival-circuit economy, he remains one of the few American filmmakers whose practice has more in common with Straub-Huillet or Chantal Akerman than with anything produced in the American independent mainstream.

Tregenza's sixth feature returns to the American South—shot on location in Lexington and Richmond, Virginia—after his Norwegian excursions in Gavagai and The Fishing Place. For Sterling (Madison Pankey), a sort of present day Alice, the graveyard Lotus she redeems becomes a totem, a saturated phenomenon permitting her to move freely in time on a phantom road. It is a sort of Ford but never a DeLorean. A Southern woman with a fair deal of historical baggage and deep secrets, Sterling journeys back to her rural home, the Lotus takes her through the shadow of the valley into the adjoining worlds of the living and the dead. Desiring to become an F1 driver, Sterling must go fast and hard, against and through all tunnels imagined or concrete. FAST is presented here in its world premiere.