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Reviewed - Tim Travers & The Time Travelers Paradox

3/11/2024

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Let me get this out of the way; Tim Travers and the Time Traveler's Paradox is a fucking fantastic film. Hilarious, perfectly-paced, well shot, strong acting, an exceptional cast, and dark as hell, it’s an absolute blast of a picture! The crowd at its World Premiere at Cinequest was raucous, and every beat seemed to play exactly as it should have for the crowd.
            But enough actual criticism, let me get into the meta-physical and scientific stuff the film brings up.
            First, the time-traveler’s paradox – a scientist (or an engineer, I guess) builds a time machine that can send them back in time one minute. The time-traveler then kills themselves, well, their old self, thus making it impossible for the future version of themselves to be there....or so the thought experiment goes. In a slightly more complicated version, the scientist kills his former self in the moments before he can activate the machine, thus meaning that there would be no way for him to end up in the past in the first place.
            Supposedly, this will lead to a time paradox, an unstable state of the universe. Some would say that this would lead to the universe folding in on itself. Some would say that this would lead to a thing called a ‘snap’ where the instant the paradox becomes evident, the universe resets to the last point where there was stability. Some would say a new set of universes would be created in which the paradox is has not occurred because the multiverse allows for the creation and destruction of universes fairly easily. And some would say nothing would happen.
            In Tim Travers & the Time Traveler's Paradox, Tim builds a time machine to send himself back on minute, and then he kills himself.
            And at first, nothing happens.
            Sort of.
            It’s messy.
            So, after killing himself a few times, he eventually collects several versions of himself, and as a team they begin to…well, all sorts of things.
            And here’s the question that gets answers, but also not asked: is Tim trying to conquer the question of what happens after the paradox, or does he simply want to kill himself and not actually die?
            That’s the type of movie this is, and it’s why I think it’s one of the best science fiction films I’ve seen in a long, long time.
            Because there are big questions in here, and there are some things that hit hard exactly because they’re bigger questions that you’d expect in a foul-mouthed scifi flick where a LOT of people get shot in the head. There’s an aspect of identity that gets presented, as each individual Tim is presented as a different character (and the nature vs. nurture argument that would lead to is MASSIVE) and that gives lead actor  Samuel Dunning the chance to play everything from the standard-issue Tim Travers (egotistical sociopath with the emotional depth of a cocktail olive who just wants to be right about the whole paradox thing) to New Tim Travers (deeply egotistical and self-obsessed sociopath who can only think about fulfilling his desires and fuck-all about the paradox) and even gets to play two sides of a romance. It’s an incredible series of performances, assisted in pre-effect work by the body double David Babbit, who physically inhabits the part with such precision that it’s hard to tell when he’s in there with Dunning’s face stitched on digitally afterwards. That’s an impressive feat.
            The rest of the cast is phenomenal. Director Stimson Snead, is great as a hitman who isn’t as on top of everything as he should be. Danny Trejo is a hitman who is probably the deepest thinker (and perhaps even the deepest feeler) in the universe. Joel McHale plays a radio show host who is basically Art Bell meets Ira Flato. He’s hilarious in the role as the guy who brings a certain amount of skepticism towards reality which is why Coast-to-Coast AM is still a lot of fun even with George Noory at the console. Keith David makes a strong appearance, and has a wonderful back-and-forth with two Tims, and there’s an excellent group of characters who hang out in the bar, some of whom seem far wiser than you’d expect from a barfly.
            And then, there’s Felicia Day.
            She plays the assistant to the radio host and goes on a date with Tim early on. She gets first hand evidence of Tim’s experiment and freaks out! It’s a hilarious moment, and one which get me thinking – her reaction is extreme, and when I asked Felicia about it in the Q+A she said she’d played the character as angry especially at Tim for being right about the whole time-travel thing. Tim’s reaction to the fact that he’s gone back isn’t anger, it’s confusion. He’s at that moment in the experiment cycle when the results aren’t matching the expected outcome, and thus he has to go about solving why without lashing out.
            OK, he does lash out, but there’s way more to that.
            The act of killing his previous self is an excellent metaphor for destructive growth, the kind you read about on Facebook. Instead of saying “yeah, I sucked, but now I don’t as much,” he literally murders the earlier version. It’s pretty clear Tim isn’t a big fan of humanity, and that includes himself. He likes science, the predictability, the reality, the messy brush with playing God by knowing the outcome and bringing it out into the world. It kinda comes off like he was a serial killer who would not have ever killed anyone if he had to face any sort of consequence, and in the time-loop he created, there were no consequences. It’s a really smart piece of writing to bring that out, and the performance of the material is great, too. It’s a lot like watching Man Bites Dog, where there’s no emotional response to the act of murder/suicide, but there is strong reaction to the outside situations and scenarios.
            The metaphysical aspects here are fascinating. There are multiple Tims running around, but there’s also only one Tim, but from different points in time. There’s an argument to be made that this would be evidence of the lack of a soul, or that consciousness itself is merely based on chemical interactions. Or, as I read it, none of that comes into play because this isn’t duplication; this is re-positioning. There are no questions about that because the only thing that’s changed is the location in space-time, bringing these Tims into the same area.  The amount of matter in the universe is static, of course, though has locally increased in the frame of time we’re experiencing in the film.
            And that is one of the big reasons I loved Tim Travers & The Time Traveler's Paradox. These questions are there, some explicit and some merely hinted at, and while I was laughing my ass off watching it, I was thinking and weighing everything. This is weighty science fiction, and there’s philosophy. The thing that makes this movie even better is that it’s also slapstick, banter comedy worthy of 1930s screwball, and there’s shock value. I love when you can get some much out of a single film, and that alone makes Tim Travers & The Time Traveler's Paradox into an absolute gem of a movie! 

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Interview - Under the Influencer

8/22/2023

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Cinequest 2023 - Fanatic

8/14/2023

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I love Boy Bands.
             Well, a particular flavor of them, more in the mode of New Kids on the Block that N*Sync or Backstreet. Maybe it’s that I came of High School in their peak period and once had an NKOTB bedspread. Maybe it’s because "Step-by-Step" is an absolute bop, and "Please Don’t Go Girl" has everything a ballad needs. Who knows, but also, it’s good stuff.
                 Fanatic is the kind of short that wakes me up from a slump of those films that never quite hit. In fact, it did it so thoroughly, I ended up watching it twice.
                 Charlie and Gerald used to be a boy band in the early 2000s, arguably the high-water mark for American Boy Bandery. They fell out of favor, and now, well now things are tough. They need an infusion of cash, and faster than a bunch of quickees behind a dumpster can provide.
                   And then there’s a contest!
This contest could save ‘em up real good, and there’s stiff competition, and old wounds to overcome.
This is kinda a ‘We Gotta Put on a Show to Save the Farm!’ short, and it does that really well. There’s more layering here, with hilariously dark humor, Behind the Music sensations, and an overall spirit that Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland would have been proud of.
                   Probably Judy a bit more than Mickey...
                The real key to this short is that these are two characters who are utterly lovable, even if they might not be surface likable. You pull for them despite their flaws, and hope that they’ll reach for the brass ring, and maybe grab it. These are characters with charm, and flaws, and flawed charm, and all of that adds up to making us root for them not in spite of those flaws, or even because of those flaws, but with those flaws they carry along the way. That is something a great film does - it lets you see what might be your story as seen through the eyes of someone else. 
                    Not me though; I can't sing. 
                 Andrew Chappelle, who I’ve been seeing just about everywhere the last few years, is great as the co-star and wrote the piece. The direction by Taran Killam (of Saturday Night Live fame, but more importantly, the best thing about Drunk History re-enactments!)  is superb, and that entire short plays out as a crowd-pleaser that takes a turn or two before you realise that those are the kind of turns that happen only in a world where songs like "U + Me = Us (Calculus)" or "I Want it That Way" could be a reality. The world we’re given here is far more full of joy and potential than ours, and the lens we view it through is an excellent example of how you film a fantasy without filming a fantasy.
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                  Fanatic shows as a part of Something Funny on Sunday, August 20th at the Hammer Theatre in Beautiful Downtown San Jose, and then again at the ICON Showplace in Mt. View on Friday, August 25th.

https://tickets.cinequest.org/websales/pages/info.aspx?evtinfo=292635~a12ee803-7eae-437e-8208-1c4d52da2020&epguid=330ab4d6-45cd-4e3a-a87e-02c739b12dbb&
 

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Sloane: A Jazz Singer

8/13/2023

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The story of America in the 20th century is the story of Jazz.
               The major names in the history of Jazz are some of the most fascinating humans who made it through those decades. Names like Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn, and Billie Holiday are widely known even today, decades after they’ve passed. They were icons of talent, who re-defined American singing traditions, and among their number, though less known today by non-afficianados, is Carol Sloane.
               Her talent, staggering. Widely-held by other performers as one of the great jazz interpreters, Carol Sloane was in the midst of some of the most important moments in the development of American music. Not only was she a contemporary, and friend, of folks like Ella and Carmen McRae, but she was there as the world of rock ‘n roll became the dominant form of popular music.
               The documentary Sloane: A Jazz Singer, looks at Carol Sloane’s career as she prepares for a show at Birdland. Now in her 80s, she’s got a show at such a legendary venue and it’s built around the reveal of the power she still possesses in performing for a live recording.
               And as powerful a performer as she still is, her personality is even more powerful.
               Sloane telling us her story, the ups and downs of several decades, from the heights of the Tonight Show and performing around the world, to working as a legal secretary, she has had a life and knows how to pass her memories to us with clarity. She imparts her triumphs and her failures with the same passion: the passion of the performer. She’s giving us the story, her story, and when things get heavy and darker, she doesn’t shy away, she goes into it, through it. She demonstrates that she is a human who understands the path of time, and what every decision means, and what it meant. She seems to understand her life as a road, and it passed through some unpleasant, and often boring, neighborhoods, but it also gave her grand vistas.
               This is a film constructed around interviews, but formed through the use of archive materials. Television performances, hundreds of photos, and perhaps most impressively, audio tapes. The way it plays visually is so impressive, and deeply textured, both in image and sound. This isn't verite, not even slightly, nor is it archive-constructed like Amy, but a hybrid that takes the best of both and runs in the interplay. At times I was brought into the world of the archive doc, but the moment I got the familiar feeling of oversaturation in memorabilia, bam, Carol Sloane of 2019 reappears and takes it all over again. 
               The incredible stuff is the stuff that is closer to Carol than to the many superstars whose names are still widely celebrated. When we see or hear Carmen McRae or Ella or Dizzy, we recognise them, but we connect with Carol, she engages us so deeply that they become a part of her story, not Carol Sloane being an ornament on their legendary tree. Perhaps nothing makes the point of the power of Carol Sloane more than the fact that when he hits us with that show we've been waiting for, and we're through to the end, I instantly wanted to hear the whole thing. 
 This is a wonderful documentary, and director Michael Lippert has choreographed a film that is the story of a life and its intersections. 
               Sadly, Carol Sloane left us in January, but this documentary serves as a stronger, more-lasting memorial than any tombstone ever could.  
               Sloane: A Jazz Singer shows Monday, August 28th at the Mountain View ICON Theatre.
               https://tickets.cinequest.org/websales/pages/info.aspx?evtinfo=292610~a12ee803-7eae-437e-8208-1c4d52da2020&epguid=330ab4d6-45cd-4e3a-a87e-02c739b12dbb&
 
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CInequest 2023 - Under The Influencer

8/10/2023

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A few years ago, in the Before Times, I reviewed a short called Followers. That film looked at the dangerous world of making your mark with more and more extreme content that is required to build the brand. That film was about the capture, the hunt for fame. I was lucky enough to see Under the Influencer which is about one who has finished the hunt, caught the rabbit, and now needs to find a way to keep catching it when the audience has started looking elsewhere.

Under the Influencer should be depressing as hell; it’s about Influencer World, a setting as dark as Hollywood in the 1920s. Instead of hitting us like Requiem for a Dream, it feels like it's going to play out almost like a good-hearted All About Eve if it were directed by Frank Capra, but then it does something completely unexpected.

It becomes the story of a life.

We follow Tori (played with incredible emotional flexibility by Taylor Scorse) as she navigates a continuing social media presence that may well have peaked. She’s in her mid-20s, and her team is attempting to keep her in the limelight. She, though, has grown weary of that world, but still keeps going because moving on could easily mean moving out of the public eye. While the professional side of her life seems to be on a slide, her world is broader and more entangled than her viewers could understand.

Now, the parts of this absolute feast of a film are magnificent, adding up to a sum that can’t be denied, but there are intangibles that toss us into another dimension. Taylor Scorse is fantastic, largely because at no point does she feel as if she’s trying to play Norma Desmond. Instead, she goes in for a human trying to avoid becoming a caricature that an audience can love. This is a tightrope that any actor would have trouble with, but at the same time, it is not a performance that is made by the material, but one that turns the solid script into something nearly brutally realistic.

Because we’ve seen this, right?

We’ve watched the rise, burn, and crash of stars, right? We’ve seen one YouTube sensation after another do everything to make it, then claw and scream and fight and fall and inch themselves back up a bit before the drastic, the drama, the endgame. We know this arc; Kenneth Anger loved it when he imagined it for every Tinseltown star of the Golden Age. This time, we’re given the kind of performance that makes us not only fall for our lead the way an audience online would, but the kind of presence that infuses a film with both warmth and confusion. Nowhere is this more apparent than when we she her finally takes a jump into music, a dream of hers that her assistant had been trying to get her to dive into. The segment, and the montage that plays out under it, is exactly what a film like this needs. It's not a triumphant step; it's a real step. That moment nearly had me in tears…which really would have worried my officemate.

The vulnerability of Tori is baked into the script, as is a devil-angel dichotomy for her producer and assistant for the first half of the film. Maybe it’s not a devil-angel thing, but more a Ghost of Christmas Past vs. Ghost of Christmas Future sorta thing…only way less dark. There’s a Ghost of Christmas Present, too, and it’s another exceptional performance. The entire character slate is full of classic film archetypes, only brough forth into something newer, or at least less pat. There's the mysterious stranger, the mystic, the plucky (and persistant) sidekick, the hired gun, the rising star, and even a sorta whacky neighbor. Somehow, these don't add up to something that feels like everything else, though. They feel like the people in your neighborhood, the people that you meet while you're walking down the street each day. 

When its boiled down to syrup, and we get the great reveal of the reality behind Tori, there you feel a turn out of the city and into the desert we only vaguely know. It doesn't feel like Tori is lost, though. It feels like Tori is finally finding herself. She is far more lost when she is in her element than when she takes herself out of it. Pulling that trick off is the mark of a filmmaker who knows what they’re doing, and actors who understand that a performance is an enabling process. When we get a lovely one-on-one exchange between Tori (I’m sorry, Vicki…) and a young man she just met, the dialogue is infused with patter and reaction and reflection, and most importantly, retention. We can see how she draws it in and lets it stew, and every moment from then on reflects on that in a way that is clear. That montage I mentioned earlier? Same thing happens, and it plays out across the rest of the film too. Same with her breakdown. Same with everything. Every moment infuses every scene, and you can sense the changes in Tori, and more importantly, in the entire film. This is a film that feels as if its an evolution, and not just a plot that plays out; it is a reality that we just happen to get a glimpse of through a screen.

Also there is the single sweetest, most perfect moment I’ve ever seen on screen. It surprised me with the simplicity, the perfection, and the absolute joy it filled me with.

I can’t recommend Under the Influencer enough. It’s one that made me think, and feel, and ultimately, want to get up and tell people.

But here, not on YouTube.

tickets.cinequest.org/websales/pages/info.aspx?evtinfo=292620~a12ee803-7eae-437e-8208-1c4d52da2020&epguid=330ab4d6-45cd-4e3a-a87e-02c739b12dbb&

Under the Influencer shows on August 21st at 930pm at the Hammer Theatre in San Jose, and then again August 24th at 11am at the ShowPlace ICON Theatre in Mountain View. 

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Cinejoy, March 2023 - Hundreds of Beavers

3/3/2023

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I have lived in the Santa Cruz mountains of Northern California for almost nine years. 

The mountains are a strange place. They draw you in and somehow change you. When you look the first time, you kinda see it, but like the proverbial frog in the proverbial pot, you sink in as it gets weirder around you. All that may be why I became so engrossed by Hundreds of Beavers, arguably the single-most avant garde feature I've seen in years. 

The premise is this: an applejack salesman, Jean Kayak (played by the amazing and long-named Ryland Brickson Cole Tews), sees his entire operation blow-up, and thus he is set to a new path, becoming a fur trapper. He takes on the creatures of the forest in a life-or-death battle, and sets about fulfilling a quest, Well, a couple of quests. It's very much structured like a video game, complete with side-quests and map-cuts. This is a structure that a lot of science fiction and fantasy films have taken in recent years, but this doesn't seem to play in those fields at the same time as being exactly in that space. 

And in that realm lies its brilliance. 

The look of the film is black-and-white, high-contrast/concept. The work they did with backgrounds is amazing, and it turns the film into a wonderland. Immediately I came to the sensation of Guy Maddin's The Saddest Music in the World, or even more closely, Night Mayor. It's not just the black-and-white, but the use of the contrast to bring us in to a place that is either charming or disquieting, usually in equal measure. The setting's non-reality is key to the marvel of the film because it plays in a universe that is almost exactly the same as Bugs Bunny and his ilk inhabit. 

The lack of almost any dialogue ramps it up, especially when we get the sound of blubbering tears or screams. The atmospheric sound seems a natural encounter, and the breaking of it to be a transgresion. This ties it to the silents in a much more real way than The Artist managed. They both feel like silent films, but here, they're working with the idea and tropes and when they do give us intentional words/utterances, they mean something. The sound design is so smart, minimalist, full of nuance, but precise. 

The action is both surreal and comical, like in Looney Toons. The way everything is presented is with a sense that Jean is unbreakable, an unkillable machine bent on taking out his terrible fur-covered foes, but he is surrounded by death... or at least the kind of death that is represented by 'X's across the eyes and drag-marks across the snow. Here, we are given a slapstick reality that plays in the unreal as much as a Mario Bros. game, but the stakes are actually there. 

In Hundreds of Beavers, we get little things that add up. A great bit of physical acting, when Jean nearly goes eye-first into a stump that has been beaver-gnawed into a stake-like death device, is just one of dozens of Harold Lloyd or Buster Keaton-worthy pieces of physical comedy. The cinematography amps everything up, and there are times I'm biting my nails like I would watching Safety Last at The Stanford. 

The fun bit is that every animal is a giant, fur-suited human. This is the closest it ties to the cartoon world. They're big, and they have so many human attributes that play off that size. This makes Jean's hunt for beaver into a great big comedy treasure hunt that finds more and more with every turn of the spade. 

This is one of the finest pieces of truly unique cinema you'll ever see. It builds beautifully, it never pauses too long to let the air out of the audience, nor moves too quickly so that nothing lands. That sweet-spot is something that many films, especially surrealist films, miss. 

You might remember a short film I talked about obsessively years ago: ‘Lullaby for Lucious & Sumat’ by Alvin Campana. The connections between the two feel deep: the use of large furry characters, puppetry (and the fish in this one are AWESOME!) the idea that the world is different in ways we both do and don't understand, and most importantly, the way that the setting falls somewhere between Magical Realism and Deep Fantasy, like Dali fighting Borges with Philip K. Dick as the ref. 

You really should set aside the time to give Hundreds of Beavers  watch. It's one of those viewing experiences that you will absolutely cherish. 

You can see Hundreds of Beavers as a part of CineJoy through March 12th.
 https://creatics.org/create/cinejoy/showcase/moviepage/267118/Hundreds-of-Beavers
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Cinejoy March 2023 - SHARE? by Ira Rosensweig

3/2/2023

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Summary 
SHARE? is a fantastic new feature from Ira Rosensweig. The amazing thing is that there is one single camera position, but it’s also incredibly dynamic. There are a lot of picture-in-picture going on, and that allows us to experience the world of the various captives. 



SHARE? by Ira Rosensweig

The history of cinema may seem to be about the fluidity of the camera. Starting in the 1910s, we saw movement of cameras through space to allow for greater exploration of the scene. This idea evolved rather slowly, but eventually things accelerated with the 1990s and 2000s making handheld camerawork very much the norm in many areas of film, especially in genre. Even filmmakers who had been long champions of the lock-down camera, like Kevin Smith and Jim Jarmusch, have gone all glidey. When we encounter a film that doesn’t play in those fields, we can be jarred by it.  
Then again, it also can allow for a stage that is a powerful platform for all sorts of performance.  
This latter is best exemplified by SHARE?, the fantastic new feature from Ira Rosensweig.  
This is a science fiction story that brought my mind immediately to a classic E.M. Forster story The Machine Stops. We open with a single man, alone, in a sparsely decorated room. He can interact with a screen using the green text that marked old computers. Eventually, he finds that he’s able to access a video-based network that allows others who are trapped (and perhaps others...) to view and communicate with one another. By producing content, they are able to earn credits towards materials for their cells.  
You can certainly see almost immediately the parallel between the SHARE? Universe and the TikTok universe, no?  
The amazing thing is that there is one single camera position, but it’s also incredibly dynamic. Yes, each of the rooms are shot from the exact same set-up, but the rooms are different, and more importantly, there’s the variety of stuff on-screen. There is a lot of picture-in-picture going on, and that allows us to experience the world of the various captives. Well, the inverted world of the captives. There’s near-constant text on the side of the screen, with data about their available funds or commands, the most important of which being ‘SHARE?’ 
This kind of film is a risk. You have to have a magnetic cast who, in essence, become your movement. The lead, Melvin Gregg, is fantastic, and Bradley Whitford, he of The West Wing and Jake’s dad on Brooklyn 99, is absolutely perfect for the role as a mentor/obnoxious jerk with a heart of slightly-less-than-gold, perhaps.

Alice Braga, though, is an absolute revelation.
She is great as the one who questions the entire system, and is eventually won over, in a way, while still maintaining her paranoia, and something akin to idealism. She is an ideal science fiction
actress, as she makes herself real at the same time as realistically interacting with the non-reality of the world she finds herself in. Everyone is great, but she’s an absolute marvel. When she gives herself over to the world she finds herself trapped in, she turns the entire piece into something more and more fascinating. And when she turns from that, it carries even more power.

The ultimate message of the piece is likely summed up in a single line: “Overall, we’re kept comfortable and distracted.” 
If there is a better phrase to sum-up the world of today, and especially the influencer/TikToker/Instalebrity/OnlyFans world, I don’t know what it is.  
This is an absolute masterpiece of a thought-experiment. Sadly, most thought experiments end up being far too deep into themselves, but this one, this is not that at all. It’s fascinating, and dynamic. We can find elements of people we are acutely aware of in our social media feeds. I did a bit of a look: one of the screens we see for a period is exactly my TikTok friend Tom, another is absolutely a dead-ringer presentation-wise for my Instagram friend Lisa. The performances feel like performances, at times, and while I would sometimes complain that would make the piece feel theater-y, it is actually far more realistic in the way those captives interact with the system, because it is EXACTLY how we interact with the systems we’ve found to keep ourselves distracted and comfortable. You can tell that it’s a choice, especially from Gregg and Danielle Campbell. They give great performances that demand you delve in deeper with every second they are on screen.  
There are so many other messages here as well. There is a simple one about group dynamics, about leaders and the prices they pay, or have extracted from them. There’s the idea of our choices being finite, free will being an illusion, or at the very least limited. There is, also, Plato’s Cave going on. I almost look at it a an inverted-The Matrix. There is no shortage of thoughtful mental discourse that SHARE? makes possible. In fact, I’d argue it forces it on you, and in a way that you eventually realise is exactly what you wanted all along. 

SHARE?? is a Spotlight film at Cinejoy on Friday, March 3rd at 5:15pm. You will absolutely want to check this one out. 
https://creatics.org/create/cinejoy/premiere/more-info/267150/Share-

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Klaus at Gunpoint Interview - Colin Babcock of The Cow

3/22/2021

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I chat with the amazing Colin Babcock about the fantastic short Mindbender The Cow! creatics.org/cinejoy/moviepage/140700#!#pills-all ​

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Cinejoy 2021 - Footsteps on the Wind

3/19/2021

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Music has the power to bring about change, not only in the heart, but in the world. Animation, perhaps the most empathic of all film forms, has a similar ability, and one that has been used for both ill and good. When the two come together, there is a magic, and that’s what happens with the magnificent short film Footsteps on the Wind.

Let’s start with the music.

Sting, that fellow from The Police and the only good film version of Dune, created an amazing song called Inshallah that is incredibly powerful. It’s a song about refugees fleeing, arriving in a new land after leaving war and strife behind them. Inshallah means “if Allah wills it” and is an exclamation used quite frequently in the Islamic world, and not only among Muslims. Sting’s song is beautiful, as a lot of his more recent work has been.

Of the song, Sting said, “It’s driven by warfare in the Middle East. It’s driven by poverty in Africa. It may be driven by climate change in the very near future. It’s not going to be something we can hope to end tomorrow. I don’t have a political solution, but I feel if there’s a solution to it, it has to be grounded in some kind of empathy for those people in those boats.”

He’s right, and empathy is often developed through the arts. Inshallah is the kind of song that can do that to you, bring your attention to something that you’ve likely heard reported on in that annoying journalistic way that presents suffering as a thing that happens, instead of as a thing that happens to actual humans who have feelings, lives, and loves. This range of experiences is communicated by those who create works of art far better than by journalists.

Animation can communicate that even better. It’s through the creation of an entire world that we are best able to focus our attentions on the things that matter emotionally. Everything you see in an animation is the product of human beings who are trying to tell a story, and to tell that story, they can excise the elements that don’t bring about the reaction they need. It is not the world as we know it, but as it might be, as it might feel, as it might become. In the amazing Footsteps on the Wind, it is also the element of empathy that is being developed, the sensation of viewing the suffering of refugees as presented in the tribulation displayed, but more than that, these characters, they’re humans. They establish this easily, naturally, by showing life, picking an orange, kids playing, a sweet scene.

Then the ground opens, and the trial begins.

The animation style is lovely, comic book influenced and clean. We are presented with a fantastical world, one of beauty and horrors, but ultimately, one of emotions, and while this can often lead to a terrible amount of manipulation, here, that is not only not the case, but it pulls back just enough to make the story the star. It’s beautiful, and the relationships between the family as they move through the world they have been dropped in are authentic. I know this feeling, though I’ve never experienced it for the reasons or in the ways of a refugee, but I understand that my nugget of understanding was a painful experience, and imagine the ramping up.

The short was actually developed with the help of refugees themselves participating in workshops. Director (and amazing human being!) Maya Sanbar shared a bit about the intention and process of the film with me - We really want it to be used as a therapy tool. We've found ways working with psychologists to trigger talking points in a way that is tough, but not traumatic: for example the octopus ink hands are about children being kidnapped, disappearing, 400 000 of them unaccounted for, says UNHCR. War was an earthquake instead of bombs so that it can also be related to any form of displacement. I'm also keen to get it into schools to talk about displacement, loss, resilience and hope. 

I remember the professor in my History of Islam class at Emerson saying, simply, “those displaced by war are first displaced from their comfort,” and the minute I finished Footsteps on the Wind, I understood it fully, and could not shake a feeling. The feeling that those in the story were not only people who had gone through a trauma, but that they’re feelings, emotions, sensations were no different than mine. We were, in fact, not just the same species, but of the same tribe. My circle had widened; the people of the world came closer. It was an empathic experience, and one that I hope many get to experience.  

I asked Maya for a quote, and she sent this wonderful message - 
"Animation allows symbolism and space for the viewer’s imagination to transgress words: there are many layers to uncover in the treasure hunt of clues within the script. We’ve taken fairytale references like Alice in Wonderland, Jack and the Beanstalk, Wizard of Oz, Hansel and Gretel, age old stories that are sometimes scary, but they help find ways of dealing with trauma. And making this about all kinds of loss and resilience, whether within or outside of the depths of the refugee experience, was important for us as it’s conceived as a storytelling tool for trauma therapy.” 
​

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For more information about the film, check out this press release. You can find out about how to see it as a part of Cinejoy, running from March 20 to 30th at https://creatics.org/cinejoy
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Interview - Avery Trufelman of 99% Invisible!!!

4/3/2020

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If you've heard the voice a the end of 99% Invisible or Welcome to Nightvale that "From PRX" that's Avery Trufelman! Amazing podcast producer, creator of Articles of Interest, and one of the best things going in Oakland, California! 
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