News

"What if a broken heart could be fixed... by removing it?" Cineverse has debuted their own trailer for the streaming release of an indie romantic drama titled With Love and a Major Organ, made by filmmaker Kim Albright. It sort of reminds me of The Lobster. This premiered at the 2023 SXSW Film Festival and it already opened last year on VOD, but we missed it during that run. Now that Cineverse will be streaming it on their platform soon, here's the two main trailers. In an alternative universe, human hearts are not made of organic matter but are actually complex, tangible objects. Suppressing one's emotions is not only normal but encouraged. One woman is so distraught over a man she loves, that she decides to rip out her heart for him, only to find that he has run off... Starring Anna Maguire, Hamza Haq, Donna Benedicto, Veena Sood, Arghavan Jenati,...

Once you get comfortable with the extremely outlandish concept of With Love and a Major Organ, there is a film that should be both relevant and relatable. The central idea is insane, but it is no gimmick. A world where emotion can be controlled through science and you can literally rip your heart out is very much Black Mirror-ish, but the treatment of Kim Albright’s film is deliberately mellow. The plot is wobbly though, and I thought the climax was pretty messy, but the film should still get appreciation for doing something as daring as this. So what are we doing in this article? Putting the film under the microscope and attempting to see it through the lens of simplification, of course.

Spoilers Ahead

What Happens in the Movie?

Imagine your life being fully managed by an app. Everything, from what to eat to when to sleep to...

Circle Collective is looking to tug at your heartstrings with their new science fiction romance With Love and a Major Organ, and we’re exclusively serving up the trailer to you today.

The film screened at a myriad of festivals, including SXSW, Fantasia, Cucalorus, and it will be released theatrically by Circle Collective in NYC on March 29th and in LA on 4/5.

From director Kim Albright, With Love and a Major Organ stars Anna Maguire as Anabel, a sensitive, empathetic young woman who lives in an alternate universe where self-care is manifested through suppressing emotion entirely. And hearts are readily [physically] removable.

“In a world where everyone’s heart is an object and there’s a strong societal pressure to dampen emotion, lonely Virtual Insurance broker Anabel always follows her heart. At odds with this overly pragmatic society, and after a series of devastating emotional blows, she rips her heart from...

Exclusive: Utopia’s arthouse distribution label Circle Collective has acquired U.S. rights to the dark comedy With Love and a Major Organ, which debuted in the experimental Visions program last year at SXSW.

Directed by Kim Albright and written by Julia Lederer, who adapted the screenplay from her play of the same name, Circle Collective is eyeing a Spring 2024 release for the title.

With Love and a Major Organ stars Anna Maguire as Anabel, a sensitive, empathetic young woman who lives in an alternate universe where self-care is manifested through suppressing emotion entirely. And hearts are readily removable. After a meaningful interaction with a stranger in the park George (Hamza Haq), Anabel takes a leap and literally gives her heart to him but does not expect for him to abscond with it.

The film was produced by Madeleine Davis (Freaks) and executive...

It is the feature directorial debut from Fawzia Mirza.

LevelK has boarded international sales for the Canadian/Pakistani dramedy The Queen Of My Dreams, which will have its world premiere in Toronto’s Discovery section. Signature Move’s Fawzia Mirza writes and directs.

Azra, a Pakistani woman living in Toronto, is worlds apart from her conservative Muslim mother. When her father suddenly dies on a trip home to Pakistan, Azra finds herself on a Bollywood-inspired journey through memories, both real and imagined, from her mother’s youth in Karachi to her own coming-of-age in rural Canada.

Amrit Kaur from HBO...

With Love And A Major Organ Photo: Fantasia International Film Festival

Falling in love is always fraught with danger. Perhaps more so for Anabel (Anna Maguire) because she refuses to do it through the app that everyone else is using. She wants to go out and find somebody. When she meets George (Hamza Haq) she is immediately smitten, but he, having no heart, is unable to reciprocate her feelings – so she rips out her heart, puts it in a box and sends it to him. As he discovers a new world of emotion, she embarks on a life of feeling nothing.

Since it screened at South By Southwest earlier this year, Kim Albright’s quirky but heartfelt film With Love And A Major Organ has been generating great word of mouth. Iit’s funny, intelligent and full of striking imagery. When I met Kim and Anna in the run-up to...

Set in an alternative world that at times seems like our own, With Love and a Major Organ can also feel as if someone asked ChatGPT to write a quirky postmodern romantic drama about technology in the style of Michel Gondry. The result, written by Julia Lederer (from her play) and directed by Kim Albright, is a film loaded with metaphors and similes where fragile hearts are made of paper and nothing is left to chance. Brains are scanned and uploaded to the cloud for a revolutionary new app LifeZap, emotions are explored in an experience that mimics escape rooms and nothing is left to chance. In short: a dreary hellhole in which human emotions are “disrupted” in favor of suppression.

While, of course, an interesting film could be made from that material, this one operates at a frequency that requires either an open mind, a few edibles––or both...