From Arab Spring uprisings to Russian disinformation campaigns, social media platforms have swung from heralded saviors to all-purpose bogeymen with breakneck speed. So how did we get here? And can online life even be fixed? Was it all the inevitable result of a worldwide collective bargain with the Big Tech devil? (Nothing in life is free, and that goes double in Silicon Valley.) With Jeff Orlowski’s The Social Dilemma, which premiered at Sundance — as did the director’s 2017 doc Chasing Coral and 2012’s Chasing Ice — these consequential questions and more get addressed through a most unusual format. The […]
by Lauren Wissot on Sep 9, 2020The creators of Chasing Coral had a key goal: to make an environmental documentary with a personal, non-political approach. As editor Davis Coombe tells Filmmaker below, he and director Jeff Orlowski “had no interest in making a political film.” Their film, instead, focuses on the personal narratives of a group of people seeking to capture the phenomenon of “coral bleaching” on film. Ahead of the film’s six screenings at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, Coombe discusses the task of simplifying a scientific story without dumbing it down. He also lays out how he and Orlowski sought to strip the film of expository passages to create […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 26, 2017