film PRESS

"Julian L. Goldberger's depiction of a 16-year-old Florida kid with nowhere to run is The 400 Blows of the '90s. Goldberger has an extraordinary sense of place and he gets an emotionally complicated, haunting performance from Ryan Daugherty. The score by Fat Mama and her Transworld Orchestra is brilliant."

-Amy Taubin, The Village Voice

"Julian Goldberger's episodic tale of the nocturnal wanderings of a 16-year-old Florida j.d. from mall to mall in Ft. Myers, Florida is distinctively crafted, with a relentlessly expressive use of stylized image and atmospheric sound. Ryan Daugherty's performance has a kind of troubling complexity rarely seen in low-budget Amerindie movies; the telling is both poetic and hallucinatory, precise and dreamy. Goldberger has dazzling command of his minimal means; I want more movies by this man and I want them soon."

-Ray Pride, Chicago's Newcity

"You had to stray all the way to the Frontier section, to which "experimental" work is banished, to find the real thing--the best independent film in Sundance. Julian Goldberger's idiosyncratic Trans, which follows the nocturnal wanderings and random encounters of a juvenile detention center escapee amid the strip malls and neighborhoods of Ft. Myers, Florida, may have had a budget a fraction of anything in competition, but it showed ten times the inspiration and cinematic integrity. The film's purposefully meandering rhythms, semi-improvised dialogue, and handheld, low-light photography might seem merely unrefined to the casual viewer, but exact editing and an amazingly inventive, hallucinatory sound design gradually cohere and cast a spell, evoking the schizoid psychology of its singular, spaced-out protagonist, played with a certain charisma by Ryan Daugherty. Alternately dreamy and stark, the loose narrative and character elements obliquely sketched in a succession of unpredictable, suggestive episodes, Trans immerses the viewer in its mesmerizing ambiences and textures on the way to an unresolved but supremely fitting ending. Goldberger's sensibility is poetic and impressionistically indirect, favoring a fractured mise-en-scéne, and exhibits a fine, unhurried sense of place and incident (a tense encounter with a bus station clerk is particularly good). He's hands down the most exciting new talent on show at Sundance. At the screening I attended, Dramatic Competition juror Richard Linklater stuck around to pay his respects, and to be sure Trans is a kindred spirit of Slacker or films like River of Grass and The Delta."

-Gavin Smith, Film Comment

2015 The Moveable Fest Interview

2014 Out Of Order Magazine Trans

2008 NPR Radio, WGCU 90.1 Interview "Florida Filmmaker"

2007 Ion Cinema Interview

2007 FLM Magazine, The Hawk is Dying

2007 Indiewire "Indiewire Interview - Julian Goldberger"

2007 The A.V. Club "The Hawk is Dying" Noel Murray

2007 The Village Voice "Bye-Bye Birdie" Nathan Lee

2006 Filmmaker Magazine "Defining Moments" Winter

2006 Dark Horizons "Sundance Film Festival Wrap-Up" Garth Franklin

2006 New York Daily News "Film Festival"