Future tales stream out to laptop audience
that’s here today
ITVS delivers byte-size Futurestates dramas
Who needs PBS airtime to get videos to fans? Not Futurestates directors. Their eerie science-fiction shorts made with Independent Television Service funding and sub-PBS budgets drew 1 million pageviews across several platforms last season, winning critical praise and funding for a second season that premiered six weeks ago.
Ten films, each 15 to 20 minutes long, provide chilling, thought-provoking visions of what a future America could look like. The concept is a departure for ITVS, which has dabbled in fiction but nothing this edgy:
- In Beholder, a woman faces a mandatory inoculation to remove her fetus’s genetic marker for homosexuality.
- Global climate change has created a traumatized generation of “environmental refugees” in That Which Once Was.
- In White, valuable melanin is drained from dark-skinned citizens and sold as protection from the increasingly fierce rays of the sun.
All are designed to be watched on computer monitors, laptops and hand-held devices. The films premiere online at Futurestates.tv, then one pops up each Friday on PBS.org, on the PBS iPhone app and on the iPad app.
“This is a completely new strategy for us,” said ITVS Programming Manager Karim Ahmad. ITVS was born of a Congressional mandate in 1988 to fund and distribute content from diverse indie filmmakers, many of which work in fiction. But getting fiction into the finite, jam-packed, highly structured PBS schedule is tough.
So ITVS created Futurestates, its first web-based series.
Directors, identified and invited by ITVS, are limited to a $35,000 budget and further constrained by a tight timeline: one year from application to distribution. Ahmad explained: “We want to keep filmmakers focused on the film, not out raising more money.”
Ahmad is pleased with the initiative so far. Many online viewers watch the whole Futurestates films; they spend an average of 10 minutes per film, “which is much higher than the average on other video-sharing sites,” he said. The Season 2 films already have logged 57,000 views in just six weeks. Last season’s 1 million views were accumulated from Futurestates.tv, PBS.org and YouTube.
In addition, the project has made a splash at festivals including Tribeca and SXSW, which provide a promotional platform. Many have drawn critical praise. A CNN.com writer noted, “Public broadcasting is more known for stiff-as-a-robot documentaries than sci-fi movies. But the channel is shaking up its sometimes stuffy reputation by producing a cool Web-only series about the future of America.”
At the Futurestates site, visitors also can browse through years to come with a “Predictometer” that forecasts various trends and events (Greenpeace predicts that by 2090, the entire world could be powered by green energy), and viewers can add their hunches about what’s ahead. Teachers get their own page, with related curricula including a history of agricultural biotechy, the concept of empathy, story framing and film terminology.
Beholder
Nisha Ganatra, a Canadian-born filmmaker of Indian lineage, first got the idea for Beholder during the fight over California’s anti-gay marriage amendment Proposition 8. That passed on Nov. 8, 2008 — the same day Barack Obama, an African-American, won the presidential election. “We’d done this amazing, this progressive thing, by electing this president,” she said, “and then this very scary thing happened with the amendment.”
That was also about the time ITVS contacted her about producing for Futurestates. She was enticed by the opportunity to play out a political idea to its extreme. “I thought, what if Prop 8 was just the first step? Where could it go from there?”
Beholder is set in Red Estates, a seemingly perfect, politically conservative gated community where every resident is genetically bred for purity and protected from a harsh outside world. Sasha, married to Bobby Aryana, a rising political star, discovers that her unborn child carries the genetic marker for homosexuality — an aberration that requires correction. Her husband takes for granted that she will receive the mandatory inoculation, but Sasha isn’t sure. Her confusion grows as she recalls a family secret and begins wondering about the wider world.
Carrying the film is actress Jessica Pare, who appears in every scene. If she looks familiar, think last season’s Mad Men. Pare played the young woman who becomes engaged to its lonely central character Don Draper. Ganatra knew Pare through mutual acquaintances and wrote the character with her in mind, but realized that securing her for the part was a longshot. “Now she’s being offered giant movies, and I’m saying, ‘Hey, do this ITVS thing for a little money!’” Ganatra said. “But I got lucky. She read it and felt the script had something to say.”
Production took three 12-hour days last August, in Los Angeles and Ventura, Calif. Ganatra considered how her friends watched movies online, by plugging their computers into a larger flat-screen TV — and decided to shoot with that size in mind.
Ganatra is perhaps best known for her 1999 Chutney Popcorn, which she directed, starred in and co-wrote; it centered on a lesbian who becomes a surrogate mother for her sister’s baby. It won several festival awards, including audience favorite at that year’s Newport International Film Festival.
It’s her first try at an online film. “It’s a great platform and site,” she said. “It doesn’t take forever to load. It’s higher-end HD, so you really feel the quality of film isn’t being sacrificed.” Each film comes with a “Behind the scenes” video, a gallery of still photos, a director’s first-person account on the making of the film, and biographies of the filmmakers.
That Which Once Was
Kimi Takesue, a Guggenheim fellow in filmmaking whose work has run at more than 200 festivals, was especially intrigued with the premise of the series — very short films set in the future that tackle current issues but aren’t totally ominous or pessimistic. “Ideally, ITVS wanted viewers left with some kind of hope,” she said, “which can be hard to achieve in that short time frame.”
Takesue takes the audience to the year 2032. An 8-year-old Caribbean orphan, Vicente, has lost his home and family to flooding caused by global warming. He’s facing an uncertain future in a big-city children’s shelter when he glimpses a mysterious-looking man hauling huge chunks of ice. He turns out to be an ice carver from a different world, but his history is similar to Vicente’s. The losses that each have quietly endured draws the disparate survivors into an unlikely friendship centered on the healing power of memory.
The producer uses a striking visual metaphor — huge, sculptured chunks of ice — to frame the film. “Ice is so ethereal,” she said; it’s perfect for themes of “loss, displacement and transformation.” She had previously worked with ice carvers for another feature, and wanted to use Natar Ungalaaq, star of the critically acclaimed 2001 Canadian film, Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner. But Ungalaaq, also a director and sculptor, lives in a remote village in the Arctic Circle is quite selective in picking projects. Takesue reached him through a fellow filmmaker and lured him to New York City for his first visit, for the shoot last August in Brooklyn and Queens.
Takesue considers her films to be contemplative works, which poses a challenge: An online movie is vying for attention. “Viewers are often multitasking,” she said. “I imagine people checking emails, getting phone calls, pausing the film. So it’s a different experience than a captive audience in a theater.” She made sure the pacing was faster than her usual style. “I tried to maintain my aesthetic and sensibility, but also wanted viewers to be able to enter the story easily,” she said. “I wanted to keep people engaged.”
White
What A. Sayeeda Clarke calls her “White manifesto” has been rattling around her mind for nearly a decade. She could see a character racing through empty New York City streets, under a mercilessly hot sun. It’s Christmas time. He’s facing a family crisis and is just one financial crisis away from losing everything.
Those nuggets grew into a frightening world where the most valuable substance on earth is melanin, the pigment that gives skin its color and a measure of sun protection. Extraction Centers draw in dark-skinned citizens for easy cash. All they have to do is drain their bodies of melanin for wealthy white recipients who need to shield their skin from the increasingly harmful sunlight. Bato, a young man whose wife is having labor pains far too early, has no money for a hospital birth. Will he lose his own identity in an effort to save his child?
Clarke has an eclectic resume: She’s directed theater, shot films for TV and assisted Spike Lee on his documentary When the Levees Broke. She’d never produced for digital distribution but was unphased. “Story and drama always supersede technology,” she said. “There are fewer limitations than you’d think” when creating an online film.
She adapted readily to the relatively tight $35,000 budget. “It doesn’t matter how much you spend; viewers are innately attracted to character and drama,” she said. “I achieved the look and feel that wanted.”
The film reflects Clarke’s travels in Cuba. She was overwhelmed by “the idea of the past as both present and future” as she witnessed Cubans’ “unbelievable ingenuity,” making do with technology decades out of date. “Yet they’re so generous,” she said. “I imagine Bato living in an enclave just like that.”
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