» Bill Cowell, Founder of The Buffalo Niagara
Film Festival is proud to announce a victorious
return for #2.
Bill pledges that this will be a spectacular 2nd year with large events and big
surprises to be talked about for years to come. Enjoyment to all, and to all
an enjoyable plight. See you soon.
Absolute
Zero -
Wednesday, March 28th, 7:50pm UB North Campus,
Center For the Arts (CFA), The Screening Room
A train makes its way through
the countryside toward the city. Part of
its load is a refrigerated wagon used for
transporting meat to the markets. Inside
the otherwise empty wagon, a man keeps a
grim log on the wall – a first-hand
account of death by freezing.
Only later it is discovered that the refrigeration unit wasn’t operating.
The temperature in the wagon never fell below 68°F – yet the man dutifully
manifests, and records, the symptoms of hypothermia as he dies a needless, painful
death.
The story is told using a combination of archival and imagined material to speculate
on the man's final hours.
DIRECTOR STATEMENT
The major challenge of the project was to move beyond a mere recounting of the
story of the man’s freakish demise, and to somehow acknowledge the surreal
nature of his death through the creation of sequences that do more than simply ‘fill
in the gaps’ of the actuality material.
Driving the script was research into hypothermia revealed that victims often
become delirious as they succumb to the cold, and as a consequence may experience
confusion and even hallucinations. These hallucinatory tendencies inspired the
speculative material incorporated into the film including the flashback sequences
and the final rescue fantasy. Equally specious is the blur-motif, introduced
during the picnic sequence as a portent of the man’s imminent demise, and
which then recurs throughout the film. Whilst obviously not literally true, the
intention of these scenes is to honour the ‘unreal’ or ‘impossible’ aspect
of the story by illustrating his increasing disorientation.
Another challenge of the production was the determination to shoot some of the
project on film, using a clockwork Bolex camera, and taking advantage of its
ability to run at various speeds and to shoot one frame at a time. Shooting at
one frame per second allowed for the blur motif to be incorporated into some
of the live action material, while the invertalometer capability provided other
unreal flourishes such as the day-into-night moonrise sequence.
The film is not a documentary in the traditional sense, nor is it intended to
be. It is, rather, a fantasy inspired by fact, and as such hopefully goes some
way toward reflecting the irony of the man’s death.
