“This is the world after the end of a world... acre by acre, fence by fence, the war was lost.”
WAR is a simple film portrait of four characters looking for work in the abandoned lands of rural America. Shooting alone for almost five years on a hand-cranked movie camera without a producer, crew, actors or a budget, we assembled an unconventional narrative out of these character studies, attempting in limited means to reveal the drama of a disintegrating society. - Jake Mahaffy
Reviews:
“Virtually a one-man labour of love, Jake Mahaffy’s WAR is one of those works that French critics sometimes term a ‘UFO’ – a film that comes out of nowhere, or comes direct and unmediated from its director’s unconscious. Working over four years without a crew and no sound, Mahaffy shot the film himself on a hand-cranked camera – accounting for some evocative flickers and variations of light and speed – then added a dense soundtrack of voice-overs, background noise and cacophonous radio. A film in the true American primitive tradition, WAR will certainly make its mark on the festival circuit... ragged as it is, this may well be the most primally odd US debut since Eraserhead.” - (Jonathan Romney - Screen International)
“'This is the world after the end of the world', one character murmurs - yet the situation is unclear: has a war come and gone? Or is this just the decaying hinterlands of modern-day rural America? Whatever the answer, Mahaffy's first feature is like nothing else in contemporary US cinema... this is a genuinely transformative experience: once seen, never forgotten.” - (Edinburgh International Film Festival 2004)
“Set amid the disappearing world of family farms, WAR reveals an unseen America wrapped in the fog of a centuries-old conflict. In this stark and mysterious film, the gradual decay of the country becomes a subtle apocalypse... Jake Mahaffy's innovative feature debut centers on three isolated characters struggling to survive in a dying society... His solitary perseverance over four years, filming on the abandoned farms of northwest Pennsylvania, creates a unique, intense, and authentic vision of hope in despair. Not just a movie, WAR is a spiritual declaration.” - (Mike Plante - Sundance Film Festival)
Filmmaker Biography:
Born and raised in Ohio, Jake Mahaffy has made a handful of short films and the feature-length WAR, which have screened at several festivals and competitions including Sundance, Rotterdam, Edinburgh, Stockholm, Cinematexas, Ann Arbor and the Student Academy Awards. He studied filmmaking at the Russian State Institute of
Cinematography in Moscow and co-founded the Handcranked Film Projects collaborative in Boston. Mahaffy created the filmmaking program at Hollins College in Virginia and is currently developing a new film curriculum as an Associate Professor at Wheaton College in Massachusetts. For Free in Deed, a feature film about a man who tries to perform a miracle and fails, Mahaffy was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s ‘new faces of independent film’ and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Creative Capital grant, the Sundance Institute’s inaugural Lynn Auerbach Screenwriting Fellowship, and an Annenberg Film Fellowship after developing the project at the 2006
Sundance Filmmaker’s Labs.
