Films made outside the established studio system with affordable equipment (toy cameras, CCTV video, iPhone's) proves anyone with an inclination to make a movie can now do so, but when you mix that with a powerful dose of adrenaline and confidence, then that my friend creates cinema heat.
This pro-active independent filmmaking community is part of the Misrule Movement. A boom of arthouse films originally came out of the UK under this banner and then spread across the world, pushing the boundaries of cinema and its power to enchant and transfix viewers. This enlivened film-making as an art form and a new wave was born. YouTube directors obsessed with European cinema and countercultural attitudes set the world alight with their micro budget masterpieces. Philosophical, commercial and occult styles blended with experimental elliptical Pick-A-Mix editing techniques. Add a dose of sex, violence and psychedelics and you have a Molotov cocktail approach to filmmaking.
Taboo topics such as social problems, poverty, abortion, drug addiction and prostitution are also tackled giving it a human connection as well as an esoteric champagne pop-culture aura. Both zippy, suggestive and also deliriously good fun.
Internationally recognized as an agent provocateur, controversial British filmmaker Fabrizio Federico led the charge with his provocative movies and the Straight-Jacked Film Festival, bringing together an army of new filmmakers who's movies run the gauntlet of outrageous themes such as espionage, marriage, mind control and radiation challenge the viewers conceptions. These auteurs explore timeless subjects with a new richer and unhinged eye. The language of cinema who's tools of sound, moving images and music was revolutionized when these filmmakers bestowed their individual vision, style & themes onto the international stage.
The cult filmmaker's newest film Teddy Bears Live Forever is being released in 2019
There’s never been a filmmaker like Fabrizio Federico. Chances are, there won’t be again. Not only is there an argument for this Brit being the 2000's lost movie-maker, there’s also the debate of him being the filmmaker that killed off the idea of 20th century cinema. As he explains it ''There is a new type of filmmaker that has been reborn and has replaced the traditional filmmaker from the 20th century, more bipartisan. I am a DJ Director, my passion is to glue video into a collage of vision, concentrating on personalities, mixing the styles of MTV, the News & Youtube vlog filmmaking together ''. His newest film is about a faded ''It girl'' suffering from schizophrenia due to an alien abduction and decides that one of her personalities must lose her virginity, even though she's already lost it.
Self-sabotage
That Fabrizio Federico is a star-shaped jigsaw piece in a square hole should have been clear from the off ever since surviving a house fire as a child. On the eve of the release of his feature film debut 'Black Biscuit' in 2011 he described making the film as being like ''Russian roulette”. He'd originally planned to make the film in North Korea but was denied a visa. He ended up filming in Nottingham with a Greek pimp and falling out of a tree and breaking his foot. Shooting the movie on toy Fisher-Price camera's and mobile phones, his apartment became a haven for the street superstars that he would meet on the streets and cast in his film, including a ping-pong champion, a dominatrix and Big Issue magazine sellers. Somehow he managed to re-finish the film after his computer exploded on the day of Michael Jackson's death.
Early perfection
This week the filmmaker announced that his next movie will be released in 2019. There’s the odd lollop of early Harmony Korine. The groove of Xavier Dolan. The cut and paste ingenuity of Jean Luc Godard. Arguably it’s stranger than any of his previous releases. He is the bedsit Lars Von Trier. Federico represents the filmmaker that for years chewed off his own limbs, simultaneously while editing footage blindfolded, listening to exorcisms on a diet of weed and yogurt, all on a micro-budget.
Raised on punk, emboldened by hip-hop, dance, free to be whatever he wanted – used to the ‘push the envelope, make magic happen, give it away for free’ ideal. On the eve of an era that saw YouTube filmmakers convert their vision into a world wide audience. But Federico delivered cinema folly in spades.
Doggedness, dadaism & drugs
In the beginning, he only screened his films at week-day film clubs, or left copies of his homemade DVD's on tables at bars and gigs. Then after his film 'Pregnant' screened in Essex and caused a riot his films were blacklisted from theatres, starting with a run at the Genesis cinema being cancelled and. Subsequently he has developed a large following in Mexico.
Everything Federico did was tangential. When Empire magazine requested him for an interview, he agreed only on the condition if he would be asked the same questions as put to Stanley Kubrick during the making of The Shining. When he was invited at the Raindance Film Festival he arrived on crutches wearing a T-shirt that read, ‘If assholes could fly, this place would be an airport’. He refused to appear on children’s television. He claimed that YouTube is more popular then Jesus.
Such contrariness and blind scepticism felt genuinely exciting in the film industry that had turned dull.
He pulled karate moves and danced like a Native American shaman. It was presumed he liked drugs. Maybe. Maybe not. “LSD isn't a drug” he said confusingly, but he claiming it cured him from sleepwalking.
Subsequently he went to the Bermuda triangle to get married, and learnt about voodoo and mysticism. Later also recording the soundtrack to his film 'Loon' at Aleister Crowley's abandoned Boleskine House, creating Zodiac Killer art, and introducing his cinema alter ego called Jett Hollywood ''a filmmaker from Mars''. After two films he released a suicide note which resulted in a missing persons investigation when the note went viral.
Smells Like TeenSpirit
Not that he ever thought he was weird. “filmmakers like me should be the norm” said Federico recently. “I think it’s weird that very average, banal films are the norm, Im looking for cinematic nirvana”.
An upcoming film dedicated to Kurt Cobain of legendary band Nirvana is being set for release in 2019 by outspoken ''Youtube filmmaker'' Fabrizio Federico, ''the film captures the spirit of Kurt's morals, not his life, but about how straight men like him can be in harmony with both their male and feminine side. We are Zen. I think Kurt was a great example of that vibe, he wanted to point us towards a more progressive society, saying 'why bother hurting each other, and all that other crap' you know, nevermind, as the lad once said.'' It's an ugly film, so ugly that it's the perfect experimental pop culture film for a new generation of 'Me Too movement' supporters. April's terrifying reality; spat out by the modelling industry, burned out, and now being tortured by her own inner demons is brought to light by the films soundtrack of doughy classical, Indian and trap music, including an end credits anthem called Wrong's by Mao, (their last album was recorded at Aleister Crowley's old haunted home facing Loch Ness) which is very uplifting in a Total Eclipse Of The Heart, way, that Kurt would have loved, his pop sensibilities were always the secret weapon behind Nirvana's power.
''The idea of the 'It girl' was first personified by actress Clara Bow in the movie 'It' (1927) which helped usher in the age of the wild flapper girl in the roaring 20's along with other intellectual sirens such as Louise Brooks. The role of the vivacious, sexual, youth-quake secretly fascinates every teenage girl early in life, and who must secretly and subconsciously try to, live up to/ or tame. Before either eventually self-destructing or simply growing out of it. In world culture, magazines, music videos, books and films have depicted this prototype historical personality of the goddess Maenad, her name literally translates as "raving ones". Over the years there have been many 'It girls' who have captured our hedonistic times, and our public's imagination with either cheap karaoke or artistic flair, girls like Kate Moss, Twiggy, Kim Kardashian, Cornelia Guest, Cara Delevingne, Paris Hilton, Kendall Jenner - but there are strange and tragic examples also of young ''it girls' lives being cut short by the seductions of glory and fame, such as, Gia, Donyale Luna, Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, Peaches Geldof and Edie Sedgwick.'' In the film her problems first started either after April become an edgy out of control teen model in Hollywood, or after joining a Las Vegas cult and being abducted by aliens while living near Area 51, nobody knows, it just started one day. Today she exists in five different realities. Now living in London, April is not a virgin, but one of her personality's, called Sam, wants to desperately lose her virginity at any cost. While she falls apart right in front of our eyes, she screams, scratches and bites away while combing her hair to smithereens, eating disgusting cold cheese and milk while switching personalities; whom one of them likes the taste of her own bloody tampons in a hot bath, wearing just a bright green 'Pulp Fiction' UV wig. Federico's been planning and toying with his new film Teddy Bears Live Forever for the past 2 years, capturing a sonic mess that resembles the warped feeling of destruction in Aprils own sweet bleached mind. The female psyche is deeply explored in the film, Federico spent a week filming in a single room filled with 70's Carpenters albums, ladybirds, Disney films, paintings and snakes capturing the mindset of April's fragile like glass breakdown.
Teddy Bear's has a built in mythology, the idea of paradise lost. Ancient mythical allegorical lands like Arcadia, Atlantis and April's titanic memories of her disembodied identity, it's weird and just plain heartwarming.
April's dream like sense of living in limbo, after retreating into an imaginary worldwithout a place and purpose, is indulged by her old fashioned 60's Carnaby Street grandfather, but her multiple personality disorder keeps her isolated from the world; re-living her faded out unreachable past. ''The film was also inspired by the Fibonacci sequence, UFO's and men with a strong feminine side such as Kurt Cobain and the tormented but brilliant missing guitarist Richey Edwards.''
The films shades of greatness is best summed up by Federico and his enthusiasm for misrule cinema ''learning how to make a feature film nurtures independence, confidence and staying power. But it also free's your imagination and passion for making a connection with something beyond everyday drudgery.'' Q: What Nirvana song, comes to mind when watching Teddy Bears Live Forever? A: Id say it's best summed up by 'Rape Me' & 'Come As You Are' I grew up with him, I learnt a lot from Kurt when no one else could reach me.
The new documentary by director Jett Hollywood examines today's rise of
the UK's underground cinema movement that involves a mish mash of broken
bones, surrealism, and punk DIY hysteria. The film relives the era
(2010-2016) of the 'Misrule Cinema Movement' which exploded after the
government abolished the UK's Film Council and the blanket frustration
manifested its self at the London student tuition fee riots and with the
Occupy protests. This period of social revolution and unrest gave birth
to a new wave of pent-up creative energy and determined filmmakers
along with Independent cinema groups started shaking the film industries
rigid cage by building their own cinemas or staging guerrilla-style
movie screenings throughout the country. The sign of the times created a
generation gap in the film industry. This is their story. FULL MOVIE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpNA75b2hCw Facebook https://www.facebook.com/anarchyintheukundergroundcinema/
