REVOLUTION SELFIE
dir. Steven de Castro, 2017
USA, 115 min
In English & Tagalog w/ English subtitles
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 7 – 7:30 PM w/ Q&A (This event is $10)
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 14 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 18 – 5 PM
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 21 – 7:30 PM w/ Q&A (This event is $10)
REVOLUTION SELFIE expands the horizons of documentary storytelling while broadening our understanding about the lesser-known fronts in the global “War on Terror.” Filmmaker Steven De Castro paints a portrait of a 48 year-old Maoist guerilla army in the Philippine hinterlands known as the New People’s Army. But rather than simply presenting interviews and images in a traditional journalistic manner, this film weaves fantasy elements and web-based camera techniques into the documentary form to disrupt our entire matrix of widely held beliefs underpinning the discussion of terrorism, poverty, and the motivations of the warriors who fight in a peasant revolution.
The film is narrated and shot almost entirely from a first person point of view, using a small GoPro action camera that the filmmaker is wearing. Because of this unique shooting angle, the film succeeds at times in giving the audience an almost video game-like immersion in the narrator’s experience.
“Discovering REVOLUTION SELFIE happened at random. The trailer surfaced on some non-movie Facebook group. The trailer brimmed with possibility of some unseen masterpiece. It played many times outside of the country, but, to my non-surprise, American film festivals did not seem to take to it. The ambition of this thing was pretty obvious from my first glance of the trailer — a movie that thinks it is a video game about the Maoist New People’s Army in the Phillipines. Employing a microbudget, rough and tumble guerilla aesthetic, director Steven DeCastro spends time with this group detailing the current political situation in the country while also providing historical context (sometimes hard-hitting and grim, other times very playfully).
These days it is difficult to find a smart “political” film in general. One that actually plays with film language is even harder. REVOLUTION SELFIE is a miracle.”
