Last night I attended the screening on an early cut of “American Mongrel,” written and directed by our Micro-Documentaries colleague, Deniz Demirer.
The film follows a road trip across the American West and a journey into a few intimate variations on the American Dream. The characters are raw, the images stunning, but what’s most exciting about the film is how it was produced. The cast and crew, which included Daniel da Silva (actor, executive producer) and Greg Fulcher of 1013media (producer, editor), combined unexpected elements of their real road trip to make the film into the fictional story of the movie itself. They incorporated locations and characters they met along the way, resulting in circumstances and filmmaking richness they never could have imagined when they first set out.
The American Mongrel team will be sending the film to Toronto and other film festivals soon. We’ll keep you posted on where and when the film premiers. You won’t want to miss it.
Personally, this film also has significant meaning. In starting Micro-Documentaries, I dreamed of supporting talented filmmakers by offering them complementary work opportunities while they pursued their labors of love. American Mongrel, therefore, also represents a manifestation of our own dream.
American Mongrel may be one of the most honest and raw film commentaries of contemporary America. What have we lost? Where are we going? What’s next? The movie’s portrayal of a road trip: the highways, the stops, fortuitous meetings and experiences are beautiful because they have an honest quality that is lost in the glitz, the empty symbols and the large budgets of most mainstream filmmaking. Are the questions answered? Probably not, but a new perspective is shown.
I am happy to see American Mongrel getting some attention. It is, indeed, a beautifully filmed movie. Some of the film seemed like new methods to me- perhaps they have been used before but there was never a feel of copying here- I very much enjoyed the non-cookie cutter artistic hand artistry layed upon every aspect of the film, lending it it’s own persona as an artwork.