Web Junkie
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“Do We Need to Be Cured of It?” Considering Web Junkie
Web Junkie, Shosh Shlam and Hilla Medalia’s startling documentary about internet addiction in China opens today at New York’s Film Forum. At Sundance, where it premiered, it was considered by Brandon Harris, and Danielle Lurie interviewed the directors. Wrote Harris, in a piece that also included discussion of the doc Love Child: In Web Junkie, teenage boys, often having been deceived into going or plainly drugged and captured with their parents’ approval, suffer a military bootcamp-style existence complete with isolation chambers and other forms of moderately cruel discipline, interspersed with moments of counseling from sensitive, largely female psychologists and a […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 6, 2014 -
Interview with Web Junkie Director Hilla Medalia
Filmmaker: Why this movie? Why did you decide to do it? Medalia: As boundaries between reality and the virtual become increasingly blurred, we are beginning to see how reality is compromised and people are losing their footing. When Shosh [Shlam, the other director of Web Junkie] told me about this story of China’s attempt to stem internet addiction among its youth, I was immediately captivated and felt that this it expressed a current and increasingly global dilemma. I began to wonder if I myself was an addict? Had I become overly dependent on technology? And would these techniques to break the addiction among […]
by Danielle Lurie on Jan 22, 2014 -
Interview with Web Junkie Director Shosh Shlam
Filmmaker: Why this movie? Shlam: Internet addiction is both a personal and social phenomenon. It is a universal issue that is becoming progressively all encompassing as the boundaries between the real and the virtual become increasingly blurred. Through this process, we could not help but feel that something is lost in the physical, “real,” everyday lives of those living in the western world. This phenomenon, these feelings are what inspired us to take this journey. Filmmaker: How much of your crew was female? Was hiring women a consideration for you? Shlam: We were four women: two directors, one producer and one editor. Hiring […]
by Danielle Lurie on Jan 22, 2014 -
Interview with Web Junkie Producer Neta Zwebner-Zaibert
Filmmaker: Why this movie? Why did you decide to do it? Zwebner-Zaibert: Now more than ever, we need films that investigate and expose the side-effects of our relationship with technology. Internet overuse is a social issue around the globe that has only emerged in the past few years; we have no idea what effects it may have on us or what we will know about the phenomenon in the future. As such, we need to exercise caution when creating policies around it. Also, as a young mother, I spend a lot of time thinking about my daughter’s future and how the Internet will impact her […]
by Danielle Lurie on Jan 22, 2014 -
Park City Critic’s Notes #3: On Happiness, Web Junkie, Love Child and the Peril of Electronic Screens
A couple nights before the Sundance Film Festival commenced this year, I came home one evening hoping to squeeze in at least a couple of pre-fest screeners before I went to bed, knowing I had a full day of hack journalist duties awaiting me the next morning. While taking the train back from the Filmmaker offices and walking through a dreary Bedford-Stuyvesant evening, I dreaded what I thought I would discover upon returning home: a subletter — a young aspirant sportswriter whose presence in our home had only been announced by one of my more regular roommates the day before […]
by Brandon Harris on Jan 19, 2014 -
Web Junkie | Directors Shosh Shlam and Hilla Medalia
Attention, our audience’s and our own — it’s a valued commodity these days. We struggle to command our audience’s attention, for them to discover our work and then, once they’ve discovered it, to actually focus on it. Meanwhile, we struggle to focus our own attention, to fight our society’s weapons of mass distraction so we can not just see our work to completion but fully discover the meanings within it. What role does attention play in your work? Can you discuss an instance where you thought about some aspect of attention when it came to your film? Is Internet addiction […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 18, 2014
