For
the second time, Balagan co-presents "Chain"
by Jem Cohen as a part of the Environmental
Film Festival.
"Like
The Savage Eye, Chain uses documentary images
to create a powerful sense of time-capsule reality
that's often ethnographic and apocalyptic in
its implications. The fictional reveries seem
intended to anchor, understand, expand, and
comment on that reality, which they do with
varying degrees of success. As the film focuses
on familiar, everyday details in the malls,
it achieves a certain monumentality by making
those details terrifying, forcing us to feel
we're in free fall, annihilating our sense of
where we are." - Jonathan Rosenbaum,
http://www.chicagoreader.com/movies/archives/2005/0305/050304.html
"Jem
Cohen won the Turning Leaf Someone to Watch
Award at this year's Independent Spirit Awards
for the genre-blending Chain, which was also
named one of the "10 most promising films
of the year" by Variety. Tamiko (Miho Nikaido
of Hal Hartley's FLIRT, BOOK OF LIFE, and HENRY
FOOL) is a Japanese businesswoman hurtling toward
the bright and shiny future of "entertainment
real estate." Researching amusement parks
and malls, she meets with nameless potential
clients and rehearses her English in anonymous
business hotels. Amanda (Mira Billotte, singer
for the indie bands Quixotic and White Magic,
in her film debut) is a runaway who squats in
abandoned or unfinished houses, makes an unsteady
living cleaning hotel rooms, and spends hours
wandering through the mall, gazing at objects
she can no longer afford to buy. On opposite
ends of the financial spectrum, both women share
a dreamy isolation as they drift through the
vast American wasteland of chain retailers and
philosophize about their relationship to work
and consumer culture. Without ever losing its
political vision, Cohen's camera captures an
uncanny beauty in the familiar, interchangeable
landscapes of today's corporate dystopia."
-Kristina Aikens, Independent Film Festival
of Boston
