Commentary

Director’s Mission Statement

“If you can learn to use your eyes and ears, you can make poetry from what you see”, Lindsay Anderson on the Free cinema.

The reason I want to make films is to assert and prove we all possess a poetic sensibility and a capacity for a more detailed understanding of things and stuff. In making a personal film, where image speaks and sound amplifies, the viewer can be delivered into the world again, as if for the first time. And, in striving after this, I feel entitled to stake my claim as the rightful heir of the free cinema. Through the combination of signs and symbols, the viewer makes their own narrative from a felt sense of what they are seeing. I intend to reclaim montage and non-linear narration, from the commercial abstractions of advertising and the music video, in order to rearm the dramatic filmmaker. I am not interested in making a cosmetic film for the amusement of a bourgeois audience, but rather I intend to commit to the avant-garde, with all that technology has to offer, in order to bring a modern pilgrim ever closer to what he knows.

Let us embrace the fast-evolving media, and not underestimate what it is that people want.

Commentary

The film was shot just before the run up to the American elections,

And in the aftermath of which, an African American moved into the White House.

This African American referred to Abraham Lincoln as his hero, who we too had chosen to single out.

But was Honest Abe a liberator or did he raise the bar too high?

As with any icon, the conspiracy theory was inescapable;

Was he a woman ?

Could his assassination have been a hoax, so that he could go back to an anonymous family life?

Was John Wilkes Booth his lover?

But despite this, Lincoln remains as untouchably iconic as the American Dream itself.

This made us wonder: How powerful is fantasy in the American consciousness?

We set the film in a ghostworld. Our streets of New York are inhabited by a new breed of American who transmit their feelings and emotions psychically, as well as overtly. But these Americans are suffering. There is no response to what they are trying to convey. These characters cannot communicate. And, since they cannot validate each other, they cannot define themselves and therefore they cannot know if they really exist. In the film, the characters represent their nation. They demonstrate an indomitable will, and a desire to effect immediate change, and yet they are subject to, what can only be described as, an ongoing traumatic stress disorder. Just as the characters force their will to their desires to no avail, the nation wages more wars that it can only lose.

The film proposes that, in the grip of a neurotic condition, what we need to do is wait, for what Robert Penn Warren describes as, a future time of joy.

Thankyou and I hope you enjoy(ed) the film

Key
Transferants are synapses in the soul which have the power to send feelings and emotions from one character to another, so, in the film, the girl’s irritation becomes the boyfriend's depression. The Transferants is the also the name we have given to the describe the characters of the girl, the guy and the mother. In the film the act like lightening conductors deflecting and redirecting their feelings and emotions. The demon is more like the conduit between the characters.