DATELINE: July 29, 2010
PMD-For-Hire HQ
The final three episodes in the FUTURESTATES collection…and you won’t be disappointed, believe me.

Not a bad episode to be found. Here was the final trio of shorts in the FUTURESTATES sci-fi collection. I was sad to see this series end.

TENT CITY (2010, ITVS, short, runtime: 18m35s, director: Aldo Velasco):

Widespread economic ruin in the United States has forced thousands upon thousands from their homes. Americans are compelled to dwell once again in Hooverville-like tent cities at the edge of town, carving out a hardscrabble existence on what little resources they have remaining. This survival of the fittest in its purest form. Matthew Ochoa (portrayed convincingly by Anthony Giangrande) is a former comic book artist who works for the city’s Resident Eviction Squad. He’s part of a team tasked with ejecting families from the houses they can no longer afford. Ochoa, however, is torn about his well-paying job. His lavish salary and perqs (for example, the black market oranges he brings home one evening) permit Ochoa’s family to enjoy an above-average standard of living, although things are not at all rosy chez Ochoa. Matthew’s lone son, Ivan, is tormented by the kids at school who know what his father really does for a living. Ivan is miserable and the tension in the otherwise sedate Ochoa household is palpable. The more people Ochoa evicts during the day, the worse it makes him feel at night because he realizes how much pain he’s causing for the families he’s evicting. His job is rapidly stripping away any shred of dignity he has for himself. As they play a familiar storytelling game of “Trapezoid,” Matthew regales Ivan with a fantastic yarn about a company which created a robot whose sole job was to remorselessly do the company’s bidding. As he delves deeper into this tale-within-a-tale, Matthew gains a lucid understanding of what he must finally do to save his soul. If he does this, he can finally reclaim the high regard his family once held him in. So he quits his job. This forces the Ochoa family to uproot themselves to Tent City, trading their secure future for the hell which is certain to come in camp. But at least Matthew can begin walking with his head high once again, and his family can respect him once more.

Notable about Tent City:

Stylistically, director Aldo Velasco employed an obscure 1962 style Chris Marker once used in La jetée: part of Tent City was recounted using voice-over narration and still black and white imagery. The short’s two “action sequences,” in which the Resident Eviction Squad’s goons eject residents delinquent on their mortgage payments, are good to watch for aspiring filmmakers. It shows how to most effectively shoot scenes rife with tension. I had a hunch was that actor Anthony Giangrande didn’t have children of his own and I made a point of telling Aldo: it was Giangrande’s distant, detached way of interacting with Ivan (Austin Michael Coleman) that convinced me parenting was virgin territory for him. Velasco also expressed his desire to one day shoot an entire feature using Marker’s still photography technique.

SEED (2010, ITVS, short, runtime: 15m37s, director: Hugo Perez):

It’s the year 2022 and a single entity is in total command of the food supply: Mendelian Corporation. “Heirloom” — or natural — seeds which are readily subject to contamination and disease have been made illegal, and corporal consequences await the “seed runners” refusing to heed this national ban. Refusing to kowtow to the Mendelian monopoly, the runners form secret cells across the country and remain a constant thorn in the side for the company and difficult to police. Mendelian has therefore founded a youth organization — the Sprouts — tasked with the job of venturing out into neighbors’ random fields armed with specially-designed “seed-sniffers” to test them for their seeds’ pedigree. Those discovered populated by disease-susceptible heirloom strains are immediately razed to the ground and burned, and severe penalties await their owners. They are hauled away at gunpoint by fascist-type sentries in clear view of the neighborhood. Juan’s father Mateo is a suspected seed runner, and Juan is his local Sprouts’ detachment’s most talented member. He’s a leader. But he now finds himself in a classic conundrum: he is compelled by law and duty to report his father as a criminal. But what will Juan do?

Things I enjoyed:

Hugo Perez — as I’d later learned during the behind-the-scenes footage — had a clear vision for this film. He wanted Fascist-era overtones to permeate the piece. The Komsomol (the Soviet Youth League), the Hitler Jugend (Hitler Youth), and the Red Guards of Mao’s Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976, are clearly evoked in Seed. Actor Sebastian Villada, playing Juan, portrays what happens when children are manipulated by a regime into declaring fealty first to State rather than to family. Perez also demonstrates that expensive-looking movie gear isn’t hard to show on-camera. Watch the short’s behind-the-scenes footage for Perez’s explanation how all suddenly became possible with $5′s worth of 1950s-era electronics.

THE OTHER SIDE (2010, ITVS, short, runtime: 18m46s, director: Amyn Kaderali):

In 2040 Americans once again become immigrants. Dire economic circumstances at home have forced them to seek out greener pastures abroad, across the border in Mexico. American jobs are practically nonexistent (unemployment is at a soul-crushing 86%!) and the United States has reverted into lawlessness, with roving gangs, stray guns, and general mayhem reigning supreme. National resources are at all-time lows, but over on the other side, life is paradise. Jeff and his two children, Jenny and Tyler, have been patiently waiting in an American village for their chance to illegally cross the border and reunite with the childrens’ mother who’s being put up by a Mexican convent. Before any of this can happen, though, the three must navigate a treacherous desert and 105 degree heat and avoid getting spotted by gangs who let bullets fly at the first sight of fleeing refugees. They only have four hours until sunset to make it. Just as the family reaches the border and within mere seconds of freedom, they’re spotted by US border guards and hailed down. Or are they?

What I LOVED about this film?

Said director Amyn Kaderali, his film will get Americans rethinking how they treat newcomers in their midst. With the economy in tatters of late, southward migration is not an altogether impossible scenario to envision. Latinos doing Americans’ dirtywork? Kaderali causes us to think how this situation can easily be reversed. The Other Side‘s cast is convincing in its portrayal of the abject fear of being potentially ambushed mere miles from freedom. We never quite know what’s about to happen until the very last, keeping us on the edge of our seats.

If there’s anything you’d like me to review, please let me know and I’ll get right onto it.

of home evictions

DATELINE: July 27, 2010
Chez PMD-For-Hire HQ
Social commentary films last night and did I find three beauties for ya!

So I was “flipping” through my PDF copy of Filmmaker Magazine’s Summer 2010 edition last night and happened across this gem of a find on p26, “The Super 8: Eight Things That Will Keep You In The Know” about an 11-episode social commentary video site called FUTURESTATES.

Eleven up-and-coming shooters were asked to write and direct their own mini-feature depicting what their vision for the world would be for the very near future. What seems to have emerged from the Independent Television Service (ITVS)-sponsored project is a smashing array of would-be doomsday scenarios ranging from genetically-modified crops and “organic seed bandits,” to the immigration debate, to gaming behavior run amok, to a potential West Coast nuclear meltdown, to the globe’s population crisis. I couldn’t get through all of them due to time constraints, but over the course of this week I’ll catch each in turn and have more feedback for you as I get on.

When it comes to these episodes, think more Children of Men than sci-fi classics like Blade Runner, even though one of my curated films today — PIA — hearkens back to Ridley Scott’s 1982 other-worldly classic.

These films are a great time investment, perhaps better left for a weekend if you’re a working professional. They’re meant to be savored, not blown through. So far, each of these three had me going emotionally at some stage in their narratives, and I don’t expect any less for the remainder.

Let’s dig in, shall we?

PIA (2010, ITVS, short, runtime: 20m06s, director: Tanuj Chopra)

In the future, human organs will be harvested for transplant into android cavities that serve at the behest of human masters. Syama, a human, is in love with Rakesh, another human. and they declare their abiding love for each other atop their California roof. They dream of growing old and raising a family together. But their hopes are prematurely dashed when Rakesh suddenly perishes of a freak heart attack. Cut to: twenty years later: an investigating police officer happens across an abandoned cargo vehicle stranded in the middle of some parking lot. He rolls open the trailer door to find a half-dozen black market androids — or “PIA units” — hanging dormant. These PIAs are impounded, to be reassigned by the federal government shortly. Yet something is not quite right with one of these PIAs. It escapes its warehouse confinement and wends its way back to Syama’s suburban home, where our human-android story adventure begins…

What I just LOVED about this film?

PIA featured a mainly all-South Asian cast which instantly brought me back to Children of Men and Michael Winterbottom‘s stunning Code 46. Director Chopra bravely chose to depict our true demographic future and kudos to him for totally going there with the talent. The energy which appears to have been invested in costumes, delicate lighting, futuristic props, and general mid-21st century touches — especially sound design for the PIA Units and the vehicles and houses — will marvel you once you realize PIA was only a short film. The leads — especially actors Tillotama Shome and Pia Shah — did something to bring tears to my eyes, a feat not easily accomplished over a compressed period of screen time. PIA‘s ethereal music, its sepia tones, the RED camera used to shoot the piece, and Chopra’s poignant dialogues combined to make this the pleasantest twenty minutes of my day. Good thing PIA was the first vid I’d seen all evening as it established just the right mood for the rest of the session.

TIA & MARCO (2010, ITVS, short, runtime: 16m11s, director: Annie J. Howell)

If the current roiling debate about US immigration policy and those state laws recently passed down in Arizona are any indication, what Tia & Marco depicts is what we can likely expect to see in the near future in the United States. Burly border sentries patrolling US-Mexico border clad in Kevlar body armor with accentuated shoulder, knee, and body pads who violently tackle encroaching “no-name illegals,” incarcerate them, then chuck ‘em back over “The Wall.” Speaking Spanish is now illegal in the United States — on pain of imprisonment — and border guards enforce Washington’s strict regulations. This short almost makes director Annie Howell look prophetic, a woman who herself hails from Arizona and knows the debate well. Tia, our protagonist, works for this US Border Service and is expecting soon — a boy. On the eve of her shipping up to New York in order to rendez-vous with her husband for her birth, an “illegal” named Marco emerges from Arizona’s desert wasteland. Suddenly, Tia and Marco are forced to live with each other for a night and a day, each managing to find the humanity in the other.

What did I enjoy about this film?

Lead actress Susan Kelechi Watson plays a truly captivating Tia. In less than 15 minutes, we witness her transition through a full range of harrowing emotions — revulsion to disgust to curiosity to empathy to affection, and by the end towards a fierce materfamilias-like protection. Major kudos to Howell for casting Enrique Ochoa in the role of Marco, who — as a Mexican-American — shatters through our conventional stereotypes of Mexicans as unilingual Spanish speakers. Who won’t be instantly charmed by Ochoa’s portrayal? I know of few. Nice work with the moving camera — chase sequences especially; hardly easy to do on lower-budget prods. And like I mentioned, if the US’ current immigration debate is anything to go by, the scenes we witness in Tia & Marco might be just what’s coming down the pike. Yikes!

PLAY (2010, ITVS, short, runtime: 19m13s, directors: David Kaplan & Eric Zimmerman)

This is a fun little romp inside game designer-writer Eric Zimmerman‘s head about the convergence between real life and game — or “second” — life. When the lines blur between what’s real and what’s virtual, something like Play emerges. While the acting was spot-on and the characters did their level best with the material they were given, I can’t honestly say I was blown away by the tale. All of its metaphorical messages aside, I believe the directing pair was trying to conjure up some sort of chaotic future world populated by folks who can no longer discern how much time they spend online dwelling in fictitious universes and galaxies.

What I enjoyed most about this film?

Visual effects were eye-catching. Notice how the filmmakers wanted to render the virtual impinging on the real using tools like “life bars,” “toggle-down menus,” “decision boxes,” and all manner of other real-virtual devices (especially in the shrink’s office!). Plot was intentionally (?) non-linear, so I couldn’t exactly tell you there was a clear-cut storyline to this piece, though the film’s overall thrust shines through. Somehow we’re left with a mega question mark by Play‘s end: what is all of this gaming behavior and online boundary-shattering coming to? Our filmmakers have a few ideas, to be sure, but I believe Play‘s conclusion is left intentionally ambiguous and artistically blank, its random strands we’re forced to reassemble all by ourselves.

If there are any films you’d like to see, kindly let me know in the comments below and I’ll get right onto it.