An aspiring writer wanders through a city looking for inspiration. Over the course of a day, he has nine distinct encounters.

“Most low-budget independent films are scrappy and rough-hewn, but Rob Tregenza’s first feature, “Talking to Strangers,” from 1988, displays a fluid virtuosity that Hollywood veterans might envy. The movie comprises only nine shots, each approximately ten minutes long, all meticulously choreographed for actors and camera alike. Tregenza uses a crane as painters might use a brush; he crafts bold panoramas with ornamental gestures, whether in the streets of Baltimore, on a city bus, inside a confessional, at an art studio, amid a busy bank branch, or aboard a water taxi. With these grand-scale intricacies, he depicts the struggles of a young writer named Jesse (Ken Gruz), who is painfully lonely and intellectually troubled. Jesse’s efforts at human connection are contentiously spiked with his philosophical despair, and in his random encounters in tight spaces he confronts emotional, physical, and sexual violence. Tregenza imbues the film’s heightened realism (and its dialogue) with a religious bent: he evokes a fallen world in which vain strivings take many forms, from the openly brutal to the presumptuously refined.

Presented by FILAMENT! Filament is a new screening initiative building an audience for independent and art films in Washington DC.