Conflicts Between Cultures Win Awards at Sundance

Maybe it’s new to American audiences, but Turkish film-makers have beaten this topic to death in the Old World. There is even a name for the genre (immigrant cinema), so our film won’t be the first out of the gate, but it won’t finish last, either. OTWOTW deviates from the genre convention because our characters are not struggling in the same sense as immigrant Turks in Europe. Plus America is not as homogeneous as Europe. What was that about melting pots and tossed salads?

Looking for websites advertising acting gigs? I found one by Googling “Olive Barrel Productions,” our company. The site is auditionsandcasting.com, and they’ve got a page devoted to Boston area auditions. It looks like they crawl websites (like craigslist) looking for acting-related postings, and then re-post them on their website.

So, for the benefit of our company, and for the actors/filmmakers who visit this site, I encourage anyone to add other Boston area film websites to this post. We’ll sort through them and make a list of Useful Boston Film Sites.

There’s this phenomenon in Japan called hikikomori, where teens, mostly males, get depressed and stay in their bedrooms, sometimes for years at a time. I watched a BBC documentary on the subject, The Missing Million a few years back. I think it would make for an interesting film.

It so happens that one of my roommates is Japanese. One of her relatives is/was a hikikomori, so I am close to a source of reliable information. In any case, I can relate to the experience of being depressed by school. Do you know any hikikomori?

REFERENCE

1. Michael Dziesinski’s blog on Hikikomori

I’m waiting for my composer to deliver the score so I can make the final cut. I am doing color correction and rotoscoping in the meantime. The poor man just moved apartments and misplaced some essential things like his cell phone and audio equipment in the process. Reminds me of the time my computer’s motherboard died during the casting, setting the production back the better part of a week. Nobody believed me when I said my computer crashed.
With less than two weeks to go to the Boston Independent deadline, things are looking pretty… exciting right now.

The second draft of Once There Was, Once There Wasn’t concludes with a final bedroom scene that is symmetrical to how the film opens. It provides an aesthetic sense of balance and closure, but isn’t really necessary for advancing the plot. Which wins out: fancy form or pithy plot?