All Tomorrow's Children
The world ends in 1999 for three high school misfits yearning to escape a Midwestern city of absentee parents, failed institutions and bridling teenage frustration. As reality races toward its own collapse, the three friends decide to slow down time through their brand of time travel, quantum physics, and magic.
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Jon-Carlos EvansDirector"(Goodbye), Brooklyn", "Antithesis," "Julya," "Salvation (Without You)
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Jon-Carlos EvansWriter"(Goodbye), Brooklyn", "Antithesis," "Julya," "Salvation (Without You)
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Isaac KienerProducer
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Ludgy WuProducer
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Rebecca HernandezProducer
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Andy MeyerProducer
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India Esmail CoombsKey Cast
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Melissa DamasKey Cast
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Sean HunterKey Cast
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Suki PetersKey Cast
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Forest BostonKey Cast
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Project Type:Experimental, Feature, Short
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Genres:Coming of Age, Drama, Sci-Fi, Experimental
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Runtime:48 minutes
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Completion Date:March 10, 2017
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Production Budget:43,000 USD
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Country of Origin:United States
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Country of Filming:United States
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Language:English
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Shooting Format:Digital - Canon C300
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Aspect Ratio:16:9
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Film Color:Color
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First-time Filmmaker:No
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Student Project:No
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MECCACon International Film FestivalToronto
Canada
October 21, 2017
World Premiere -
BLOW-UP Interntional Arthouse Film FestivalChicago
United States
Official Selection -
Rivercity Underground Film FestivalSan Antonio
United States
Official Selection -
MECCaCon International Film FestivalAtlanta
United States
February 10, 2018
Official Selection -
MECCACon International Film FestivalSaint Louis
United States
February 1, 2018
Official Selection -
CUNY FIlm FestivalNew York
United States
April 21, 2018
Best Narrative Film -
Black Pot Mojo Film FestivalMemphis
United States
April 21, 2018
Memphis Premiere
Official Selection -
Wordfest-Houston International Film & Video FestivalHouston
United States
Texas Premiere
Bronze Remi - Experimental Dramatic Film -
The LIft Off Sessions 2018
Official Selection
Jon-Carlos Evans is a Berlin based filmmaker, audiovisual artist and writer. A native of St.Louis, MO, he holds a B.A. in Film Production from Webster University-St.Louis and a MFA in Media Arts Production from the City College of New York. Under his musical alias Klaas von Karlos, Evans is also the founder of experimental-electronic collective ReVerse Bullets and creative director of the GLITCH performance series/music label. As Klaas von Karlos, he is a member of music projects BIINDS, Naked Sweatshop, and Divan Rouge. His previous works include the short films "Antithesis," "Goodbye Brooklyn," "Julya," and "Salvation (Without You”).” He is a recipient of the Eastman Kodak Student Grant (2006), the Aloha Accolade Award (2010, Honolulu International Festival), and the Silver Palm Award (2010, Mexico International Film Festival). His recently completed feature, "All Tomorrow's Children," continues to play in festivals after winning the Bronze Remi Award at Worldfest Houston and Best Narrative Film at the 2017 CUNY Film Festival. Currently, he serves as a Staff Writer for media website Black Nerd Problems and teaches film production courses at dBs Berlin.
During my senior year of film school in St. Louis (winter of 2006), I was overwhelmed with applying for graduate programs and finishing my thesis film, Salvation (Without You). During my late night/early morning frenzies of overactive brain activity, the title All Tomorrow’s Children emerged. I knew nothing about it then, only that it would focus on teenagers growing up in the Midwest near the end of the millennium and the story would play upon the paranoia of a society unsure of a rapidly approaching future. The story and its characters would challenge the educational, religious and familial structures of a society stabilized through denial, conformity and suburban sprawl. Music, superheroes and revelries of sci-fi technology and concepts would be their only escapes. All of this was clear from the beginning, but thankfully I was smart enough to realize that I would not be ready (as a filmmaker or a human) to direct something so closely linked to my past until I was far away enough from those experiences to recognize them for what they said about not only myself, but about the region, its people and the times. Six years later, I find myself out of graduate school, living in New York City and now Berlin as a freelance filmmaker and being called “sir” by teenagers. Victor Hugo’s words suddenly rang true: “Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.”
Since moving to New York in 2007 and Berlin in 2012, I have visited St. Louis only four times. Each visit, however, is more revelatory than the last - Downtown really is that empty at night; driving and drinking, unfortunately, go hand in hand; Sundays are for church and football; differences hang like targets around the necks of the freaks, hippies, punks and wanderers; and worst of all, time does not move. The more I go back, the more I feel the black hole of time hanging above and below the city. Change either comes slowly, or not at all. “All Tomorrow’s Children” is a film that explores the collision of a society incapable of change with a generation of children teeming with rebellion, pharmaceutical dependencies and parental misguidance.
At its core, the film is a coming of age story, not just for the kids involved, but for a society on the verge of realizing its own limits and embracing its newfound powers. From form to façade, the film is an exploration of fractured time, uncontrollable desire and insurmountable isolation. Through the use of long-takes, multiple-cam HD style shooting and contemplative tableaux’s, I aim to create a collision amongst the mediums used to spark a pervading sense of immediacy and restlessness. Visually, the film is the natural evolution of the aesthetic of my previous projects – an emphasis on the juxtaposition between darkness and rich colors, along with the artificial halos of light created from the ambience of the city. In terms of tone and conceptualization, I find my film as a hyper-amalgam of Vigo’s Zero de Conduite, Kelly’s Donnie Darko, Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs and Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures. Like a Kandinsky painting, the film will be an explosion of colors and sensations that appear chaotic to the uninformed, but upon closer inspection, the chaos is actually just the beginning stages of a newly birthed universe.
My mission in filmmaking has always been to craft the perfect balance between neo-realism, magical realism, and surrealism.