New York Film Festival: Afterschool

I saw the screening of Afterschool at the film festival on Wednesday night. The movie is written, edited and directed by 25 year old Anthony Campos who is the youngest filmmaker at the festival. The film was a very interesting look at modern day teenagers and the effect the on-line, video culture has on them. The star of the film was Ezra Miller who plays Rob, a somewhat awkward, shy boarding school kid who is obsessed with on-line video images of all sorts (including some horrifyingly violent porn). Rob gets unwittingly caught up in a disturbing, violent incident at the school which was truly horiffic to watch. Rob's reaction and way of coping with this incident is also very difficult to witness and it certainly creates a bleak picture of the morality of the average teenager.

The film is shot in an unusual, home-video like style. Often, the action is taking place on the edge of the screen or even off-screen such that you are left to piece together what is really going on. Also, there are a number of moments where characters are deliberate put out of focus, particularly the adults, which also leaves you with a feeling that you are only getting a snapshot of the full picture. Rob is involved with a video class and there are a lot of extended sequences which you are merely viewing what is being recorded by the video camera which deliberately makes the audience feel like another internet voyeur. The movie feels very realistic - it was filmed on the campus of an actual boarding school using the actual dorms and classrooms as its setting - and this feeling that it could all really happen kept me glued to the screen.

The realism also left me feeling very depressed - Rob's impulses and thoughts are quite disturbing and the sense that this is what today's teenage boy could be thinking is quite a shock to the system. Even the opening images, which are of videos Rob watches on the internet, made me really think about what kids are really watching on the internet (which is pretty obvious but still hard to process). In the end, I needed to cling to the thought of the inane, cute videos which he throws in to the mix and hope that the levity of those can somehow win in the end. In particular, Rob mentions but the film does not show one video which I happen to love so to cheer myself up I just tried to think about this all the way home: