Yesterday, Braden King’s HERE was selected among 16 films in Sundance’s U.S Dramatic Competition. Earlier in the year, I ran into the filmmaker who was invited at the festival as part of a panel discussion on The Discovery Process and how his feature debut lends itself to both the cinematic and scientific experience. The short interview below on a Park City bus was an update of sorts on a project we’ve been keeping tabs on for years now, as HERE has been supported by Sundance, Cannes and several other artist funds.
Most filmmakers fine-tune their feature film and logically produce one oeuvre, in many ways HERE is a film experience that had offspring of it’s own: POSTCARDS FROM HERE (watch) and shown this summer in NYC was HERE [ THE STORY DREAMS ] — a live, dynamic deconstruction of the feature film in a multi-screen, hybrid film-concert which I obviously would have liked to have experienced, but we’ll mke up for it next month when we cover the film version.
HERE stars Ben Foster (upcoming roles in Rampart and Yellow) as Will Shepard is an American satellite-mapping engineer contracted to create a new, more accurate survey of the country of Armenia. Within the industry, his solitary work – land-surveying satellite images to check for accuracy and resolve anomalies – is called “ground-truthing”. He’s been doing it on his own, for years, all over the world, but on this trip, his measurements are not adding up.
Will meets Gadarine Najarian (Lubna Azabal – most recently from Denis Villeneuve’s Incendies) at a rural hotel. Tough and intriguing, she’s an expatriate Armenian art photographer on her first trip back in ages, passionately trying to figure out what kind of relationship – if any – she still has with her home country and culture. Fiercely independent, Gadarine is struggling to resolve the life she’s led in Canada and Europe with the Armenian roots that run so deeply, if unconsciously, through her.
