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Film on the Square
We Live in Public

Friday 23rd October Vue 6 and 7
Sunday 25th October Vue 6
Monday 26th October Vue 5

UK release: 13th November*

Dig! director Ondi Timoner recently became the first filmmaker to win the Sundance Grand Jury Prize for documentary twice with her latest unflinching venture, We Live in Public taking this year’s award. Like her directorial debut, this documentary is like falling down Alice’s rabbit hole and landing in a dark technological, Orwellian nightmare. Timoner turns her ever penetrating gaze onto the pioneering dot.com kid and Warhol-esque Josh Harris, the Oz of the legendary Big Brother-esque millennium experiment ‘Quiet’, charting his exploits from his visionary (and often unsettling) foresight into human interaction with the internet to his self-inflicted anarchism and his lonely TV-obsessed childhood.

Warhol’s immortal words, ‘In the future everyone will have their fifteen minutes of fame’, seems ironic and archaic in a society in which anyone can extend their ‘fame’ beyond those fifteen minutes. But Harris realised this back in the early nineties, and what manifested was an inhumane experiment that unhinged the fragile minds of the participants and its rose-tinted creator. Equipped with Japanese style hotel pods, an interrogation rooms and a live gun range, ‘Quiet’ was a dark nightmarish (re)imagining of Orwell’s 1984, making the popular antics of Big Brother look like an episode of the Teletubbies.

Where they lived, played, worked, partied, fucked and shat; each and every intimate moment of the artists was under surveillance, to themselves, to each other and those privy on the outside. This social utopia project quickly (and naturally) descends into something grotesque, something very bacchanalian and pod-wellian. Blurring the boundaries of exhibitionism and privacy, ‘Quiet’ shattered any notions of the latter and predicted our insatiable addiction to the former. With his pet project shut down by the police hours into the new millennium, Harris went from the domineering puppet master to broadcasting his turbulent relationship with live-in (ex)girlfriend and willing participant, Tanya Corrin, in his own intimate 24 ‘Truman Show’.

Harris is a man of contradiction, introverted yet immodest and vain, cerebral artistry yet sadist and exploitative, infuriatingly juvenile yet distant and intimidating; an online pioneer yet perpetual child. Timoner is able to sift through over 5,000 hours of footage by Harris, edits and creates a cohesive documentary on the theatrical tragedy that is Josh Harris’s life. Through his hubristic rise to his implosive fall, Timoner also charts the short history of Internet and our unsettling yet ravenous consumption of it. In less than twenty years we have almost willing relinquished our privacy for virtual narcissism. Maybe we are all Josh Harris in disguise, children desperate for attention.

If I could give this film a number of stars, I would give it a trillion stars. Seriously, it is that good.

Subject to change*