Cottonmouth
Official selection, Ridgeline Film Festival 2025. Best feature, Ninth Street Film Festival 2026.
The programmer's note
The reason to programme this is Renata's competence. Okafor spends twenty-five minutes showing you exactly how good this woman is at her job, and everything after that is legible because of it. Watch the second boat sequence with the light off. We ran it at a late show in Atlanta and the room did not move. It leaves us on the twenty-ninth of August and will not be back before spring, so do not save it for later.
The film
Renata Boyd removes nuisance wildlife for three counties in south Georgia. Mostly that means rat snakes in attics and a raccoon under a church. The bank hires her to clear a hunting camp on eleven acres of blackwater slough before an auction, and the job pays four times her usual rate, which she should have read as a warning. The camp has power it should not have. There is a boat with a warm engine. Okafor builds the first half as procedure: traps, tongs, the specific patience of a person who works alone in water, and a running audio diary Renata keeps for a brother who does not call back. When she finally meets the man who has been living at the camp for two years, the film becomes a negotiation neither of them can win, conducted mostly in the dark and mostly in a boat. Cottonmouth is a thriller that respects work, and it is unusually good on the sound of a place where nothing is ever dry.
