Unsound Film

[Zulema Estabrooks]

Wehad a great and extended rehearsal process two weeks before we started shooting, where I could exercise my theatre background. We worked through the scenes, even ran the whole film in order. I approached that as a theatre practice, because when you shoot the story is fractured, so rehearsing like that gave the actors the through-line they needed, and I loved it.

Absolutely, and I think it raises a lot of fascinating questions about that. So we have a trans person (Finn) that begins as a woman and is moving into becoming a man, who has an emotional attachment with a gay man (Noah). So the question of how Noah perceives Finn, what part(s) of Finn that Noah is in love with, is raised.

The scene in the Deaf Club, where everyone is dancing and the music is pumping! The Deaf cast and extras there were all chatting, with a cup of tea or a glass of wine and their world was so joyous! That completely rubbed off on all of us. It was a beautiful, joyous experience rehearsing the song, everyone chimed in and it was just an awesome celebration of what we were doing and what the film is about.

This aspect of casting a cis-woman playing a trans man is incredibly disappointing and hard to ignore. While the film really had a powerful opportunity to create representations for several marginalised intersections, and employed multiple Auslan and trans consultants in the attempt to get it right, in my opinion it fails in this regard. Casting for queer white characters is not that hard.

Chicago, IL, September 12, 2015- ANDREW RAFACZ begins the fall season with Sensors for the Unsound, a solo exhibition of photographs, paintings and sculpture by Jeremy Bolen. The exhibition continues through Saturday, October 31, 2015.

Using experimental documentary techniques, the artist collects data from a number of seemingly disparate sites, connected by the similar ways they have been changed through human intervention and manipulation. Over the last four years, the artist has engaged in field research in both Vieques, Puerto Rico, where significant military testing took place for over 60 years and Ottawa, Illinois, where young women painted clock dials with radium laced luminescent paint beginning in 1920. Today both sites have multiple landscapes existing at once: the visible spectrum of abandoned factories, military bunkers, rivers, forests, oceans and laboratories and the invisible toxins and radioactivity that flow beyond our sensory capabilities.

Other works in the exhibition offer a disparate language of collected and considered materials that act as sensors, filters and frames including window screening, erosion pads, lawn seed blankets, industrial rubberizer and particles of negative photographic film. Every work in Sensors for the Unsound becomes its own system, operating as both document and recorder, simultaneously collecting and presenting both visible and invisible phenomena with the hope of extending our modes of observation.

JEREMY BOLEN (American, b. 1977) lives and works in Chicago. He received his MFA from UIC in 2012. He is a recent recipient of the OxBow Faculty Artist Residency in Saugatuck, MI; Anthropocene Curriculum Campus Artist in Residence at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany; Center for Land Use Interpretation Residency in Wendover, Utah and Joshua Tree Highlands Residency in Joshua Tree, CA. His work has been widely exhibited in galleries and institutions, including Galerie Zurcher, Paris; Salon Zurcher, New York; The Drake, Toronto; Untitled Art Fair, Miami; Depaul University Art Museum, Chicago; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, and Roots and Culture, Chicago. His work was recently included in Ghost Nature at La Box, Bourges, France and Gallery 400, Chicago; Fragments of an Unknowable World, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH; Lateral, The Mission, Houston, TX; and Phantoms in the Dirt, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL. He is included in numerous private and public collections.

Andrew: The two central performances (Reece Noi and Yiana Pandelis) in Unsound are really, really beautiful and wonderful to see. How did you come about this script in and where did you kind of learn about this kind of story?

And rather than laying the politics of the film there, what we decided to do is just allow it to be treated as a the story of a love story. And in that way, we could tell this beautiful heartfelt story that allow the politics to exist within that. And then it kind of fell into place.

Ian: In the writing process, to begin with, we had consultants from the trans community and the deaf community working with the scripts. And then when we went into rehearsal, we follow that through so we had cast members that were AUSLAN only speakers, so all the time, we had AUSLAN translator with us in rehearsal and on set. We had trans consultants with us in rehearsal and on set so for me, it made it much more of a collaborative process.

Andrew: There is that discussion about ownership about who owns stories and who can tell stories, but then I look at a film like A Fantastic Woman, for example, with Sebastin Lelio is telling a trans story to tell a really powerful trans narrative. While he is not trans himself, he has created a powerful film.

Andrew: I want to talk about the dance sequences, and the nightclub sequences (deaf rave clubs), too, because it is such a beautiful kind of presentation of the deaf community. I was aware that there were these sort of dances and events that deaf people could go to to experience music, but the way you presented here is so wonderfully informative and educational. Did you attend a dance like this to get an idea of what it would be like?

Andrew: I really hope a lot of people head along to go and see Unsound and appreciate it. As a director, what were the things that you learned as you were going along? And the changes that you might instil into your productions that you will go in to in the future?

Love me some Barry Jenkins. Moonlight has that hypnotic visceral quality in my opinion. I was just blown away by that film. I knew about Barry before Moonlight, back when he did Medicine for Melancholy.

These mumblecore guys and gals were making movies the wanted to make for next to nothing. Granted there are limitations to what you can do with next to no money, but you get to just focus on making films without the money part.

Your mindset is everything. How you view your abilities. How you view your potential influences your behavior and ultimately your success. I had the wrong mindset starting out. Lemme show you the math on that:

Ideas are a dime a dozen everybody has ideas. You can wake up tomorrow with a cool idea. Ideas mean nothing without a solid script. Ideas mean nothing without a writer who can turn it into a great screenplay. Ideas mean nothing without a director who can tell the story in a compelling way.

With craft, you can take a simple story and tell it in an exceptional way. Your execution is what will set you apart from everything that has come before you. Then when you get the occasional cool idea you can knock it out of the park.

The trick is to make inexpensive failures. Inexpensive in terms of time and money. You wanna burn through all your big mistakes on small cheap projects, like micro films. This way you have a safe little sandbox to play and fall on your face while nobody is watching.

On the note of ultra-compact lights. Recently spiffy gear sent me two of their Lumiee bracelets. They look cool AF. Definitely get points for the cool factor but how useful are they on set? Seems like a gimmick.

I started this project in September of last year. Yes, this was just another short film, but I was pushing myself into new areas and pushing myself out of my comfort zone with this one. This is the first short film where I was working with an editor and a legit composer.

I see a lot of films and read a lot of scripts. one of the most common things that I run into is filmmakers mimicking other filmmakers is especially Quinton Tarantino. The extended dialogue scenes, the golorification of gore, the non linear story telling, pretty much everything that you can mimick about him.

Hello Paid Listeners! Thanks for your support. Writing this summary of Day 2 of Unsound during the early afternoon of Day 3. The fest is off to a great start, but the best is yet to come. I\u2019m already exhausted! I have to run to a film screening shortly so will try to keep these notes a bit more raw than what I sent out yesterday.

UNSOUND is a must-see at Melbourne Queer Film Festival, even if only for the sake of encouraging filmmakers to keep telling stories like these, with ever better representation, brave imperfection, authentic heart and willing vulnerability.

For more information on the festival, this film and the festival programme, visit:

Kevin Black Bryan Blue Sara Brauer Darious Britt David Fenion Justin Kreinbrink Kirsten Long Christina Marafino Steve McKee Damon A. Mosier Gary Mosier R.D. Mower Michael Mulcahy Lissa Staples Wynelle Waters Toreenee Wolf

Darious Britt is a filmmaking YouTuber I've been following for a while now. I actually first got interested in his videos due to his vlogs about the film festival circuit of this very film. Now, after god knows how long, of touring the circuit, he's plopped it online.

So, Darious, thank you. This film is amazing. It is very clearly a low budget debut, and, as such, has some flaws you would come to expect out of such a thing, but man. When this film hits, it hits fucking hard. You can tell Darious wrote and directed this film with so much emotion, because it comes through in the images and sounds given off. The last 15 minutes are just an emotional powerhouse. So happy I watched this.

Really powerful. A great film for its story and acting. Sometimes the audio felt off and the production design as a whole isn't great given it was a relatively small scale budget movie, but the story is very personal and intimate, which makes the emotional impact resonate that much more.

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