2011-2020 Arthouse Experimental Gina Telaroli USA

Gina Telaroli – Here’s to the Future! (2014)

adminNovember 13, 2015

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Blurring the line between fiction, documentary, and experimental filmmaking modes, Telaroli herself plays a director attempting to recreate a scene from Michael Curtiz’s Depression-era drama The Cabin in the Cotton. While Telaroli presides over a round robin of collaborators who take turns performing the same scene again and again, a roomful of cameras, phones, and laptops capture the scene and its production from every conceivable angle.

One a late-summer Sunday in 2011, a female director (Telaroli herself) gathers a team of filmmakers, writers, musicians, artists, critics and friends in an apartment to recreate a scene from Michael Curtiz’s Depression-era drama The Cabin in the Cotton. Over plates of pasta and glasses of red wine, a round robin of non-professional actors take turns performing the same scene, again and again, in different permutations. With a freedom influenced by pre-Code Hollywood, cameras, phones, and laptops are scattered around the set at almost every possible angle, documenting the action – both in front of and behind the camera – as it unfolds, from rehearsals to equipment adjustments to the banter between takes. An intimate, playful, and spontaneous look into the collaborative cinematic process emerges, a snapshot of the filmmaker’s perennial struggle to capture fleeting moments before the day (and light) slip away.