Chain

I saw a rough cut of this at the Portland Experimental Film Festival, and while largely unedited, the footage I saw was some of the more honest and moving I've seen all year. While revolving around a fictional narrative, the film was shot in real locations(all of them large shopping multiplexes), and I was amazed to find out that while the filming took place in multiple countries, the common mall has become so homogenized that I could barely tell one place from another. The characters are believable, and it took me a while to figure out that it wasn't a straightforward documentary. This is a meditative, mature opus from Jem Cohen, in line with his earlier work Lost Book Found, where truth and fiction blend to compliment the overarching idea, which he stated at the screening he drew largely from ideas inspired by Walter Benjamin's "The Arcades Project." Beautiful stuff.