Paterson

what’s in a name) – whose name ‘Paterson’ coincides with the place where he lives, the bus from which he observes this and the famous poetry of his idol William Carlos Williams – and his artistic wife (Golshifteh Farahani), who encourages him to publish his ‘secret notebook’ of poems.
Poetic stylistic devices such as repetition, reflection, symmetry and exaggeration of everyday details, which occur in voice-over and written text in Paterson’s observational poetry (actually written by Ron Padgett) also recur visually, including in the large number of twins passing by. Jim Jarmusch (whose documentary Gimme Danger also screens at IFFR 2017) shows all this in a calm, fluid pace, with soft light and his characteristic often drily comical vignettes involving peripheral characters. Dog Nellie won the Palm Dog in Cannes.