Future Now Film Festival!

IMPERIAL SENATE, GALACTIC CITY, CORUSCANT, 28 July — Darth Maul taps the microphone and says casually, “Is this thing on?” then recoils and turns redder at the feedback now reverberating throughout the senate chamber. Approaching the microphone, more lightly, a second time, he begins to speak,

As you all are aware by now, Anakin wimped out, and so the Emperor had to reanimate me to host iRez’ 2012 Future Now Film Festival.

This film festival is a challenge. Should you choose to accept this challenge, your quest is to find films and videos, old Hollywood feature films, new Vimeo & YouTube indy shorts, works of any length and old or new, so long as they explore visions of future culture:
• Androids / Cyborgs
• Artificial Intelligence (sentience)
• Augmented Reality
• Gamification
• Humanity+
• Mind File (uploading to the grid)
• Virtual Reality

We’re interested in ideas of what reality will be, what the human experience will be, and what it will mean to be a human being, as we move through the years of this 21st century.

These topics have been the stuff of science fiction for as long as any of us have been alive, but today, with Larry & Sergey wearing Google Glasses, with Steve Mann, the Toronto professor who’s been wearing a heads up AR display every day since before Larry & Sergey were undergrads, being attacked by McDonald’s employees in Paris, we can no longer comfortably avoid these ideas with the distancing label of “Sci Fi.” Today, the future is now.

In both Hollywood features and indy shorts, it anecdotally seems that the number of dystopian visions of new technology vastly outweigh the utopian visions, but certainly there are both.

Level 1

FESTIVAL CURATOR QUEST
Your first quest is to find works and post them here on iRez with the Future Now Film Fest category. If you earn enough L1 Experience Points you can be a Film Festival Juror in Level 2. If you don’t you can still sell the popcorn.

With your complete shorts, and trailers for features, you can post as much or as little commentary / review of the piece as you like.

FILM CRITIC QUEST
You can alternately choose the “Film Critic Quest” and analyze the films / videos of your choice, considering one work, comparing and contrasting more than one work, or contemplating how our depictions of future, culture, and technology tell us something of who we are, and who we have been, at different moments across the time of the human adventure.

Perhaps it is appropriate that more techno-future pieces are dystopian rather than utopian in that there is always time to appreciate and celebrate, but maybe less of a window than we realize to steer around the many large boulders facing us in the exciting rapids ahead. I may not be a great cheerleader like Yordie or Aero, still, I am a cheerleader at heart, and so I’ll throw the a first, new reality “good,” contribution into our festival, Bruce Branit’s 2008 piece, World Builder:
 

W O R L D . B U I L D E R

Category: Virtual Reality, Uploading Mind File
Ideology: Utopian
Running Time: 9:15

Released: 2008
Studio: Branit VFX
Story: A mysterious man uses holographic tools to create a world for the woman he loves.
Cast: Brian Paulette, Erin McGrane
Writer / Director: Bruce Branit
Producers: Bruce Branit, Brian Adkins
Contact: branitvfx.com