BY AUSTIN BURBRIDGE. LOS ANGELES (CINEMA MINIMA) — The remarkable independent feature, DONOVAN SLACKS by Kivmars Bowling will have its East Coast USA premiere at the Queens International Film Festival in the borough of Queens in New York City 2008 November 8 Saturday 12:30 PM.
Logline: When Donovan Slacks, a 1920s hospital patient, (re)discovers the terrible secret of his past, his world collapses. Determined to break free and win the woman he loves, the man silenced all his life leads an uprising against the government.
The film — which stars Ashley Penrose — has been made with high style in meticulously observed period design; and in color which resembles the look of films of the period shot on two-color Technicolor or bichrome film.
The production was shot on Super 8 film. It looks gorgeous — the promise of Super 8 as a serious choice for movie makers is realized in this remarkable motion picture entertainment. DONOVAN SLACKS marks recent trends of young movie makers turning to film — and to Super 8.
Director’s comment: 1928 and a man who has been raised all is life to believe he has a debilitating bone condition discovers, completely by chance, that it’s all a fiction. A lie. Munchhausen by proxy. Every structure he ever knew and every idea he had about himself is annihilated, he becomes an unmarked sheet of paper. And in this emptiness he sets about writing his own rules, drafting himself afresh. He becomes the leader in a local fishermen’s dispute with the government and somehow persuades them to found their own country and fight to the bitter end. Is he thinking clearly for the first time in his life, unfettered? Or is he gripped by a mania? And how does that logic or that mania get transmitted to a whole group of people? The surreality of a revolution or an uprising. The logical mania, the suspension of disbelief that makes a whole group of people, despite the odds, decide to put up barricades and fight come what may. Donovan Slacks’ personal revolution leads to a political one, with one driving the other. It might be called a pessimistic ending, but it’s also uplifting, because for a brief period he and they have really lived, they created their own rules.
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