Missing Pictures

Clément Deneux & Abel Ferrara, Tsai Ming-liang, Catherine Hardwicke, Naomi Kawase, Lee Myung-Se / 2022 / 60 min.

For the five-part VR series Missing Pictures, Abel Ferrara, Tsai Ming-liang, Catherine Hardwicke, Naomi Kawase, and Lee Myung-Se were asked about a film they had always wanted to make, but which they never completed. Now they tell us, in a virtual reality world, why this film meant so much to them. And why it was never finished.

For every film completed, dozens of potential films fall by the wayside and never make it onto the big screen. In Missing Pictures, five directors give us a guided tour of a story they were not able to tell. In this VR work, together with the director we enter a scene from such a film that was never made, while the director talks about this dream project.

Parallel to Missing Pictures, Eye is screening the best films by these makers. On 16 December, there will also be a special with VR director Clément Deneux and internationally renowned film director Naomi Kawase, who will tell more about the series, their collaboration and the difference in approach and effect between cinema and virtual reality.

Director of the VR Clément Deneux and filmmaker Naomi Kawase visited Eye. We asked them about their experiences with the new medium.

Programme

Abel Ferrara: Birds of Prey (US)
Birds of Prey would have been his dream political thriller. Until the film fell from Ferrara’s grasp. The provocative director of films such as Ms. 45 (1981) and Bad Lieutenant (1992) takes us onto the set of his uncompleted neo-noir, set in ’70s New York.
Tsai Ming-liang: The Seven-Story Building (Taiwan)
Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwanese slow cinema maestro, doesn’t really have a ‘missing picture’, but what he does have are memories of his youth that are so vivid they would be impossible for him to film. The filmmaker turns to virtual reality to take him back to the Malaysia of his youth, when every evening his grandparents took him to not one, but two films.
Catherine Hardwicke: The Monkey Wrench Gang (US)
Following the huge box office hit Twilight, Catherine Hardwicke tried to make an adaptation of The Monkey Wrench Gang, a cult book about the US counterculture of the ’70s, and a precursor to eco-activism. The director revisits this project she was so enthusiastic about and which, owing to the reluctance of the Hollywood studios, was never finished.
Lee Myung-Se: Father Is Gone (Zuid-Korea)
Father Is Gone should have been Lee Myung-Se’s debut film, but things didn’t turn out like that. Now, the director of First Love and Nowhere to Hide finally brings his lost project to life through virtual reality. Against the backdrop of a family that moves to a suburb of Seoul in the 1960s – where the director himself grew up – Father Is Gone strikes critical notes about the role of the father in traditional Korean culture.
Naomi Kawase: Oh Debu (Japan)
Japan’s most celebrated female filmmaker brings a project to life that she envisaged following her 2015 film Sweet Bean. Oh Debu tells the story of Aya, an over-romantic 27-year-old woman. With this story, Kawase wanted to challenge herself to finally make a comedy, far removed from her naturalistic, poetic earlier work.

15 December 2022 through 4 January in Eye in the Room at the Top.

VR can have side effects. Read more on virtual reality sickness.

The presentation Missing Pictures was organised in collaboration with IDFA DocLab.

This is part of

Extended Reality in Eye Missing Pictures

Details

Director

Clément Deneux & Abel Ferrara, Tsai Ming-liang, Catherine Hardwicke, Naomi Kawase, Lee Myung-Se

Production year

2022

Length

60 min.

Language

English

Part of