CENTERPIECE FILM

Official Selection, 2026 Tribeca Film Festival

Young Mazino (Beef, The Last of Us) continues to raise the temperature on screen, this time as Father Dan, a holy man with a feral coyote, hellbent on leaving no vow unbroken as he barrels down a long winding road toward reckoning.

After complaints about his eccentric sermons, Father Dan is suddenly a priest without a parish, or a home for that matter. Dan leaves Oregon on a pilgrimage of a different sort to Cheyenne, Wyoming to grieve the passing of his high school friend–swigging whiskey in between dispensing free absolutions for lost souls in the parking lot. Along the way, Dan attracts unlikely companions, wildly spinning with their own invisible injuries, as grief’s gravity pulls him toward the dark heart of estrangement.

Adapting a novel by Daniel Hornsby, Hannah Peterson’s moody, simmering VIA NEGATIVA channels the great American road trip–its weird highway attractions, entanglements with strangers, and lonely urges lashing around in a heartland of depopulating churches and geographical wonders repurposed into teen watering holes. In this barren terrain, Mazino is a tortured and taut bundle of lost bearings, of pain seeking purpose, a man who could just as easily burst into tears of salvation or rain upon the world like a million flames.

– Christina Ree

Pre-Screening Reception: 4:15 PM – 5:15 PM
Program Start Time: 5:15 PM

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