"The Year Of The Everlasting Storm"
A love letter to cinema, shot across 'The US', Iran, Chile, China and Thailand, by seven of today's most vital filmmakers. New life in the old house. A breakaway, a reunion. Surveillance and reconciliation. An unrecognizable world, in the year of the everlasting storm. Jafar Panahi, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Laura Poitras and other heavyweights of global cinema reflect on 2020 in this sweeping auteur anthology film for the age of 'COVID'.
As a result of 'The COVID-19' pandemic, film production came to a halt in March of 2020 and filmmakers across the world were confined to their homes. The work and daily life of the film industry and film culture were destabilized. In a few short weeks, modes of socializing, working, and consuming were radically altered. Filmmaking as we knew it had reached a standstill, deemed unsafe indefinitely. The film is made under a state-imposed stay-at-home order, forbidden from writing screenplays or directing films. The films finds an innovative and audacious way to comment on the circumstances and absurdity of his confinement. Co-directing inside their apartments, the filmmakers eliminated all but the essential modes of filmmaking to connect, collaborate, and create in the face of limitation and an uncertain future. The result, "The Year Of The Everlasting Storm", is a beguiling, self-reflexive statement on the enduring spirit of artists. Inspired by creativity and ingenuity in a unique circumstances, the documentary wants to challenge artists around the world to reimagine the boundaries of filmmaking and film production and embrace limitations to tell diverse, personal stories that reflect and respond to this moment of distance and isolation. The shoot is confined to the location of filmmaker quarantine. The filmmakers not shoot in public spaces. The cast and crew is limited to those in quarantine on location. Props, costumes, and production equipment is limited to those onsite. All genres and modes of filmmaking are encouraged but temporal and geographic continuity is maintained. Animation, archival and browser action are all permitted, as long as there's evidence within the film that it takes place in the here and now. Production and post-production crew members work from home.
Over the course of the summer of 2020, the ground of the pandemic began to shift underneath us, along with the scientific community's guidance. Each country has it's own approach to the pandemic. And even within each country, nothing is static. Some of the original rules no longer make sense. Much like every individual during this pandemic, we quickly find ourselves in a position to arbitrate between which rules could be broken and which could not. In life, rules are broken for reasons both practical and poetic. In art, it's the same. Shot in secret during the pandemic, "The Year Of The Everlasting Storm" comprises seven shorts from some of the filmmaking firmament's most acclaimed names. Billed as a true love letter to the storytelling power of the moving image, these collected tales are deeply personal responses to life under lockdown and, together, make up an extraordinary cinematic journal chronicling human existence during what's an unheralded historical moment.
Written by Gregory Mann.
