Caught in the ’net

Director Ondi Timoner on We Live in Public, her timely and cautionary tale of a life lived online

ROOM WITH A VIEW: We Live in Public

By MALCOLM FRASER

Ondi Timoner is a good example of patience and persistence paying off. Her filmmaking method relies heavily on long-term commitment, following her subjects on and off for years. Dig!, her study of two rival rock bands as a microcosm of the music industry, was one of the best documentaries in recent years and won her the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance festival. This year, she became the first filmmaker to win the prize twice, this time for We Live in Public.

The film follows the travails of artist/businessman Josh Harris, a pioneer of Internet technology who struck it rich in the ’90s dot-com boom. In the weeks leading up to the millennium, Harris holed up over 100 artists in an underground bunker equipped with constantly running webcams. Timoner was hired to document the resulting madness, with copious drinking, fighting and fucking (and the ensuing mental breakdowns) all captured and streamed online.

The Mirror reached Timoner by phone at her Los Angeles home, where she was on a break between worldwide screenings. Asked about the impetus for making the film, 10 years after documenting the bunker, her answer is immediate: “Facebook—the first status update I saw, and then people rushing to get into it. It reminded me of people going into that bunker, and not really knowing what they were getting themselves into.”

After the bunker project, Harris outfitted his own apartment with cameras, and proceeded to launch a 24-7 webcast of his life with girlfriend Tanya Corrin. All this public exposure eventually led Harris to have his own breakdown, and before long he was another forgotten casualty of the burst dot-com bubble.

Art before humanity

“It was the perfect puzzle, but he didn’t make it easy,” says Timoner of her distant, impenetrable subject. “But that was part of the challenge. A huge part of the story is how disconnected he is, and [how he] became that way from his childhood. His whole life is a show. There’s a danger to that, in that humanity isn’t first. Art is more important to him.”

At the end of the film, Harris has essentially dropped out of Western society, but he has recently re-emerged, trying to hustle a next-level social networking video site called Wired City. “In the context of this film, I’m Luke Skywalker and he’s Darth Vader,” says Timoner when asked her opinion of Harris’s current endeavours. “I see where things are going thanks to him, and I’m trying to raise consciousness about getting trapped in virtual boxes, as we cross over this tipping point of the virtual world taking over our lives. He sees the same, but he’s trying to exploit it as much as possible. He’s trying to commercialize our addiction. He figures if someone’s doing it, it might as well be him.”

The film’s portrait of ’90s Internet culture is a reality check on how fast our technology-driven society has accelerated. “It was only 10 years ago,” notes Timoner with amazement. “It’s historical, but it also begs the question of where we’re headed. Look how far we’ve come in 10 years—where will we be in five?”

With an incredibly rich resource of footage, Timoner has created a fascinating and timely cautionary tale, with Harris’s experiments serving as a metaphor for our current willingness to sell our souls for online attention. “Everything I wanted to communicate with the film is hitting home big time,” Timoner enthuses. “I can’t tell you how many identity crises I’ve witnessed around the world at the Q&As for this film—people who want to turn off their cell phones and just talk, or take a break from going on Facebook. It’s been incredibly gratifying.”

WE LIVE IN PUBLIC SCREENS AT
THE GRANDE BIBLIOTHÈQUE ON
THURSDAY, NOV. 19, 9:30 P.M. SEE
RIDM.QC.CA FOR MORE DETAILS

Let the real one in

Hot docs unreel at the 12th annual Rencontres Internationales du Documentaire de Montréal

A YEAR IN THE LIFE: October Country

by MATTHEW HAYS

If ever the old argument about truth being stranger than fiction needed any further evidence, look to this year’s line-up at the RIDM, Montreal’s documentary film fest. The 12th edition of this extensive, global look at non-fiction filmmaking includes some of the strangest subjects imaginable—many of them previously overlooked.

In Ari Libsker’s latest documentary, the filmmaker examines a sub-genre of lurid pulp novels that became hugely popular in Israel in the ’60s. In Stalags: Holocaust and Pornography in Israel, Libsker explores this series of books that portrayed sado-masochistic female Nazi guards as they tortured and sexually tormented male prisoners. The popularity of the books grew as the landmark Eichmann trial played out. In Carmen Meets Borat, filmmaker Mercedes Stalenhoef introduces us to the townsfolk of Glod, a small Romanian village. After Sacha Baron Cohen used the town as his setting for Borat’s hometown, the citizens decide to launch a multimillion-dollar suit against the film studio, hoping to win big bucks. Stalenhoef shows us the desperate villagers as they plan what they will do with their hoped-for booty, while also raising broader questions about the ethics of filmmaking itself.

In Last Train Home, Lixin Fan offers his directorial debut, illustrating the hardships faced by factory workers in China. With very little dialogue, Lixin creates a poetic film about the terrible price of an epic economic miracle. It’s produced by Montreal-based EyeSteelFilm, the same people behind Yung Chang’s magnificent Up the Yangtze. In October Country, co-directors Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher follow an American family over the course of one year as they wrestle with financial ruin, domestic violence and sexual abuse, among other things. And there’s more family strife in 18 ans, in which a young woman celebrates her 18th birthday while grappling with the ongoing problems that come with having an alcoholic mother.

STRANGER THAN (PULP) FICTION: Stalags:
Holocaust and Pornography in Israel

In American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein, we follow the controversial American academic on a speaking tour as he expresses his belief that Israel has misused the memory of the Holocaust to excuse its own hate crimes against Palestinians. Finkelstein, author of The Holocaust Industry, is a fascinating and divisive figure and this film captures the profound polarizing effect he has on audiences around the world. And Amy Miller chips away at Canada’s international rep as a decent humble do-gooder in Myths for Profit: Canada’s Role in Industries of War and Peace, showing us how the true north strong and free has invested in various not-so-peaceful enterprises around the globe.

Tories eager to sidestep the issue of the tar sands (that would include you, Mr. Prime Minister) would do well to avoid H2Oil, a sobering documentary produced by Montreal’s Loaded Pictures that examines the environmental fallout from the world’s largest tar sands development in Alberta. Cancer rates skyrocket as a gaggle of government and corporate spokespeople insist that nothing is wrong and that business must go on as usual. Yet another depressing look at how serious the scope of the tar sands development is—and an indication of how much worse things will get. In A Place Called Los Pereyra, Andrés Livov-Macklin introduces us to a group of godmothers who arrive in an isolated Argentinian village once a year to meet with and help children. Without judgment, the filmmaker raises questions about what charity is and what it means.

RIDM SCREENS FROM NOV. 11–21.
INFO: RIDM.QC.CA