After already 7 completed feature movies over 10 years, many people already know Ivan Noel’s, and his growing reputation as an ‘Enfant Terrible’ in indie filmmaking. Distributed in various countries, and frequently featuring and winning prizes in important Film Festival across the world, his films are respected for their realistic approach to difficult and often untreated themes involving childhood or adolescence, morality, difficult relationship with parents, sexuality, illnesses – and even joy and jubilation at times! From comedy to drama, to horror, Ivan Noel’s ever varying genres invariably produces watchable and entirely original films with a difference.
Eight years after a cataclysm and disease ravaged the human race – leaving just one in every ten surviving -, all social structures have crumbled like sand castles. Too still live for anything to have been reconstructed. All remaining animals have been consumed and no sowing has yet been possible. It is Man at his most basic, destitute level.
Two groups inhabit the desolate and abandoned land: packs of orphaned children in a feral state, living a nomadic life-style for their safety, and adults (with their offspring), barely surviving any better by living off their meat.
It is a war only the most desperate of the two will win.
Neither in families, nor in politics, the legal system, schools, or at work, can all truth be spoken about the reality of our lives. It is social suicide to be honest.
Art has that great advantage that it can utter those truths many avoid.
Much of Ivan Noel’s work deals with morality-for-moralities-sake, shows the suffering it imposes, and the inevitable hypocrisy it generates, and truths it deforms. Countless people, families, even entire cultures have suffered at the hands of institutionalized morality that helps no one and only destroys lives pointlessly.
One of the great illusions of our time, is the idea that humans have somehow ‘progressed’ over the last centuries to a more civilized being.
Surely technically they have, but as animals they remain (as the famous phrase says) just 9 meals away from Chaos. In other words, take their food away, and watch them turn into animals in a matter of days.
This film will attempt to show how our social constructs are made of sand, how our ‘pacific’ ideals are blown to the wind at the first provocation, our taboos (such as cannibalism, or procreation before adulthood, etc) perish at the first pang of hunger, or social need: how we cloak ourselves in a thin veneer of civility, only in times of peace. From the moment our survival is a risk, every morality, every ideal collapses, and we turn into what we were, we are and will always be: dangerous, superstitious and destructive animals with death wish. As past and recent History proves time and again.
How would children behave left to their own devices? What would they naturally do, or not do? How ‘helpless’ would they really be, and how far are we from knowing them as they really are? Are they ‘innocent’ in any way, or is it they simply haven’t learnt yet?
This film will be shun the usual post-apocalyptic film clichés (for example, those that try to make us believe that while there is shortage of food and water, ammunition factories work 24/7 to manufacture a massive demand for bullets, machine gun strips and small mortars). We are going for the realistic approach to what life might most likely be after all structures have collapsed, and all needs to ‘maintain appearances’ have vanished. We based our ideas on past similar situations in Man’s History.
Like most of Ivan’s films, the film ends with a hard-hitting twist that will turn its story on its head.
It will also be a first for Noel Films since it will officially be an ‘English speaking’ film. Although the ‘natives’ depicted in the film will speak in their local tongue, the narration and main conversations will be in English – opening more doors to its future wider distribution.
Simply put, your contributions, each one of them, are making this film possible. We have no other financial input.
As Ivan Noel’s previous films have shown, he is able to create high technical and artistic quality films on EXTREMELY low budgets. This one will be no different. However, a minimum of 20,000US$ is needed to pay for fuel, transport, camera hire, and very basic salaries, for kids and grown ups.
Every one of your donations help us achieve this goal!
We have, in the past, run 3 very successful crowdfunding campaigns and produced very worthy films that add to a dwindling amount of truthful films, so please let’s beat the record with this one!
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