In the year 2035, dream-auditing is a prolific but thankless business, especially for James Preble (Kentucker Audley). Scrummaging through an individual’s archived dreams via an endless collection of VHS tapes, Preble finds himself constantly stuck between mundane reality and the elusive world of someone’s REM cycle. The primary goal of slumming through this government job? Dream taxation. One afternoon, as he visits the home of Arabella Isadora (Penny Fuller and, in the dream world, Grace Glowicki), a welcoming but mysterious dream tax evader, the lines between consciousness and unconsciousness grow blurred. A love story, a comedy, a 1980s children’s fantasy […]
by Erik Luers on Feb 23, 2022Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney’s surreal sci-fi romantic comedy Strawberry Mansion reimagines the dystopia as something shockingly similar to our own world: a society where even our dreams are plagued with marketing and advertisement. The director duo also acted as editors for the film, and share the joy of working with post-VFX for the first time. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job? Birney: We’ve always edited our own work—it just seems like a natural part of our process. […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Feb 2, 2021Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney’s surreal sci-fi romantic comedy Strawberry Mansion reimagines the dystopia as something shockingly similar to our own world: a society where even our dreams are plagued with marketing and advertisement. DP Tyler Davis shares what the team took from music videos and fantasy films like The NeverEnding Story to capture their dreamy, fantastical vision. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job? Davis: In early 2019 I met Albert Birney (one of the directors, along with Kentucker Audley, […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Feb 1, 2021The Sundance Institute has been running producer and director labs since 1981, even before taking over and renaming the former US/Utah Film Festival in 1985. In that sense, the projects coming out of the Feature Film Program (whose founding director, Michelle Satter, is still in charge), Indigenous Program and Documentary Film Program are just as important a marker of Sundance’s effect on the US film ecosystem as the platform provided by the festival. When I programmed film festivals, I tracked their press releases as closely as official lineup announcements. This year, 16 projects in the festival were officially supported by […]
by Abby Sun on Jan 31, 2021