MISSED CONNECTIONS ANTHOLOGY
8:18 BLOCK 2 TRUE STORY
Documentary (USA) 2018
Directors: Pamela Falkenberg & Jack Cochran
East Coast Premiere
SYNOPSIS: Add titles and line breaks to seven of the most tantalizing posts we discovered on Craigslist Missed Connections, and Voila! -- you have found poems telling tales of romantic misadventures, lost opportunities, and broken hearts. Cast actors to recite the poems as a monologue in front of a green screen, and then create an experimental, free-wheeling, special effects laden collage behind each of them. Use that mise-en-scène to imagine the backstory of hope, despair, delusion, disaster, and cross-purposes that led, in each of these instances, to a public and yet anonymous soul baring exposé shared with a voyeuristic audience that mostly does not include the one-and-only to whom the post was directed, and you have Outlier Moving Pictures most recent film, "Missed Connections Anthology," a whirlwind tour -- in less than eight and a half minutes -- of the perils and pitfalls of millennial romance.
DIRECTOR BIO: Pamela Falkenberg:
Pam is an independent filmmaker who received her PhD from the University of Iowa and taught at Northern Illinois University, St.Mary's College, and the University of Notre Dame. She directed the largest student film society in the US while she was at the University of Iowa, and also ran films series for the Snite Museum of Art in South Bend, IN. Her experimental film with Dan Curry, Open Territory, received an individual filmmaker grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as grants from the Center for New Television and the Indiana Arts Council. OT was screened at numerous film festivals, including the AFI Video Festival, and was nominated for a regional Emmy. Her other films include museum installations, scholarly/academic hybrid works shown at film conferences, and a documentary commissioned by the Peace Institute at the University of Notre Dame.
​​DIRECTOR BIO: Jack Cochran:
Jack is an independent filmmaker who has produced, directed, or shot a variety of experimental and personal projects. As a DP he has extensive experience shooting commercials, independent features, and documentaries. His varied commercial client list includes BMW, Ford, Nissan, Fujifilm, Iomega, Corum Watches, and Forte Hotels. His features and documentaries have shown at the Sundance, Raindance, Teluride, Tribeca, Edinburgh, Chicago, Houston, and Taos film Festivals, winning several honors. His commercials and documentaries have won Silver Lions from Cannes, a BAFTA (British Academy Award), Peabody Awards, and Cable Aces. Jack was trained at the University of Iowa Creative Writers Workshop as well as the University of Iowa film studies program. Some notable credits: Director of Photography on Brian Griffin's Claustrofoamia, Cinematography for Antony Thomas’ Tank Man, Director/Cinematographer of Viento Nocturno, and Cinematographer of Ramin Niami’s feature film Paris.
DIRECTORS' STATEMENT: Jack Cochran and Pam Falkenberg are making personal films together again, under the name Outlier Moving Pictures. They hope their new films will be worthy of the name -- avoiding the usual patterns and approaching their subject matter from the margins (which sounds better than saying that as filmmakers they're oddballs and cranks). Pam and Jack met in graduate school and made films together when they were young. Jack went on to become a professional cinematographer working out of LA and London, while Pam stayed in the Midwest, where she was a college professor and independent filmmaker before dropping out to work in visual display. Their first film together, "The Cost of Living," based on some of Jack's short poems, screened at several film festivals, including the Buffalo International Film Festival and the Cornwall Film Festival, and took the award for best experimental film at the WV FILMmakers Festival in 2016. Other short poetry films have screened at the Ò Bhéal Poetry Film Festival (2016), the Juteback Poetry Film Festival (2017), the Festival Silencio (2017), the Filmpoem Festival (2017), and the 6th CYCLOP Poetry Film Festival (2017). Just completed is a new film about the North Dakota landscape and Teddy Roosevelt, "Teddy Roosevelt and Fracking." Along with that, a series of shorts about photo opportunities and roadside attractions in Texas, a collaboration with poet Lucy English on a film poem for her "The Book of Hours Project," and this anthology of experimental romantic comedies based on Craigslist's Missed Connections. Then, who knows?
https://www.outliermovingpictures.com/