Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Sundance Film: Connected: An Autoblogography about Love, Death and Technology

Director: Tiffany Shlain
Website: http://connectedthefilm.com/

Summary: With wonderful heart and an impressive sense of scale, Tiffany Shlain’s vibrant and insightful documentary, Connected, explores the visible and invisible connections linking major issues of our time—the environment, consumption, population growth, technology, human rights, the global economy—while searching for her place in the world during a transformative time in her life. Employing a splendidly imaginative combination of animation and archival footage, plus several surprises, Shlain constructs a chronological tour of Western modernization through the work of her late father, Leonard Shlain, a brain surgeon and best-selling author of Art and Physics and The Alphabet Versus the Goddess.
With humor and irony, the Shlain family life merges with philosophy to create both a personal portrait and a proposal for ways we can move forward as a civilization. Connected illuminates the beauty and tragedy of human endeavor while boldly championing the importance of personal connectedness for understanding and coping with today’s global conditions.

Excitement scale (1-10): 3 – This is one of those ideas that ends up either really cool or extremely pretentious. There is no middle ground and unfortunately, these documentaries tend to fall in the latter category. Shlain is relatively new to the documentary world and her desire to experiment and try something unique could be refreshing, but so far I’m not too hopeful.

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