As the new general manager of the Farmington Civic Theater, Clare Cooney plans to add some indie films to the historic Farmington landmark’s familiar mix of tentpole movies and family favorites.
Starting Aug. 8 and running through Aug. 14, she’ll be screening “Descendent,” an intriguing sci-fi thriller that premiered at the 2025 SXSW festival in Austin, Texas — and that she appears in as the lead character’s therapist.
Written and directed by Peter Cilella, “Descendent” is about a school security guard (Ross Marquand of AMC’s “The Walking Dead”), a man with childhood trauma in his past, whose wife (Sarah Bolger of FX’s “Mayans M.C.”) is pregnant with their first child. When a beam of light from the sky overcomes him during a late shift, he wakes up in the hospital and is haunted by visions of an alien visitation.
Cooney, who will participate in a question-and-answer session after the Aug. 14 screening, says she worked on the film for three days and did all of her scenes with Marquand.
“We had a really good time. I think there was a little trust necessary because I was playing his therapist and he really had to kind of go for it in some scenes,” she says of the intense exchanges between them as Marquand’s character begins to unravel.
Cooney, who recently marked one month on the job, follows former Farmington Civic general manager Scott Freeman, who stepped down after a nearly 15-year tenure that the city of Farmington lauded on its website as “marked by innovation, community connection, and a deep love of cinema.”
Movies have provided a multifaceted career for Cooney, who grew up in Beverly Hills and is a Groves High School alum. After graduating from the University of Notre Dame, she spent eight years in Chicago working as an an actress and filmmaker followed by five years in Los Angeles. Her acting credits include a recurring role in the CW’s “4400” and appearances in NBC’s “Chicago P.D” and director Steve McQueen’s film “Widows.”
As a filmmaker, she has directed six short films and one feature film. Her breakthrough short, “Runner,” was accepted by 15 film festivals and earned six awards plus a Filmmaker to Watch nomination from the Atlanta Film Festival.
”Being a director allowed me to use every part of my brain in a way that was really fantastic,” Cooney says.
After finishing her first feature film as a director, the high school thriller “Departing Seniors,” Cooney wanted to spend time with her family in Beverly Hills and wound up meeting her fiance, who lives in Ferndale. After looking for a job for around six months, she found the opening at the Farmington Civic.
“It felt very kismet. I felt like it was a really good fit,” she says.
With the Main Art Theatre and Maple Theater both now closed and demolished, she sees an opportunity to help fill the indie film gap in metro Detroit’s suburbs.
“There’s a dearth of these kind of films in the greater metro Detroit community,” she says. When it comes to ”the latest Sundance or SXSW feature, “it feels kind of like we only watch those on streaming or we just never see them.”
Another idea on Cooney’s agenda is doing more community events linked to big-budget and family films and those with Michigan ties. She also launched a Michigan Movie of the Month series in July with a one-night screening of “Disfluency,” a sensitive drama by University of Michigan alum Anna Baumgarten. The Commerce Township filmmaker set and shot the project in and around her hometown.
Cooney is currently putting together a celebration of the 85th birthday of the Farmington Civic, which takes place in September.
She appreciates that her new role doesn’t prevent her from acting or filmmaking and is in the midst of developing a feature film that would be her first as both director and writer. She would like to shoot it in Michigan.
Titled “Still Life,” it’s a psychological thriller about a woman who moves in with her fiance and agrees to let him keep a private, locked room, a decision she regrets when a mutual acquaintance goes missing.
“The main character has a stutter, and I have a stutter, and her stutter becomes much more severe over the course of the film,” says Cooney, whose own stutter is “quite mild.”
Describing it as “a very personal” project that she is excited about, she explains: “I wanted to write a thriller about the parallel between the mind and the body, where when … (the character) starts to kind of plunge into paranoia, her body starts to betray her and her stutter starts to really come back in a really scary way.”
Sounds like a good future candidate for a Michigan Movie of the Month.
Contact Detroit Free Press pop culture critic Julie Hinds at jhinds@freepress.com.
‘Descendent’
8:30 p.m. Aug. 8-13 and 7:30 p.m. Aug. 14 (The Aug. 14 screening will be followed by a q-and-a session with Clare Cooney.)
Farmington Civic Theater
33332 Grand River Ave., Farmington
Not rated, but recommended for ages 17 and up.
To buy tickets, go to thefct.com.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: New manager hopes Farmington theater can help fill void left by the Maple and Main Art
Reporting by Julie Hinds, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
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