Writing
'Bo' Gritz is one of America's highest decorated Vietnam veterans and the real life inspiration behind Rambo. He also killed 400 people, turned against Washington and moved to the Nevada desert where he now sleeps with many weapons. Filmed over ten years using impressive visual material, Zimmerman's portrait of Bo embodies contemporary American society in all its dizzying complexity and contradictions.
Examines the resilience of residents who are profoundly overlooked by media representations and wider social responses. Interweaving intimate portraits with the residents' own historical re-enactments, landscape and architectural studies and dramatised scenes, the film asks how we might resist being framed exclusively through class, gender, ability or disability, and even through geography.
2016 marks the 500th anniversary of Thomas More’s Utopia. His pioneering account of an ideal society (the original meaning of the word utopia being both no-lace and good-place) set the template for numerous literary, artistic and filmic speculations in the centuries since about the best way to imagine and order the perfect society. Its impact is immeasurable, and while the counter point, dystopia, is perhaps more familiar to our troubled times, the book’s call to imagine a better possible future has never been more relevant or necessary. My version of Utopia speaks with the voices of primary school children imagining their own Utopia. A lesson to us about the world we made for them.
Filmed in parks and markets within and beyond Tbilisi, and also in the ancient hermetic cave networks of Davit Gareja on the desert border with Azerbaijan, Birdboy and the General unfolds within a specifically Georgian reality to tell a larger story of place and purpose, control and change, aspiration and refusal. Given life by the evocative creations of Abkhazian puppeteer Denis Gonobolin, it speaks to forms of belonging rooted and realised in imagination, and looks to celebrate the potency of play, something slightly absurd, a skewed juxtaposition and leap of faith, to redirect the course of events, whether personal or public.
Fairy tales are handed down from mothers to daughters, and from fathers to sons. As they are passed on, the tales grow in the telling – or gradually depart from the original, as new elements get added, or others get cut.
