Fucked Up Point Blank
Anxiety unseats the narrator in time and place as she tries to rewrite the story in search of a less violent ending. FUCKED UP POINT BLANK is a glitched found-footage film about anxiety interfering in storytelling. To unravel the truth, an anxious person struggles to rewrite with set structure, characters and tone. With each attempt to alter the narrative, the potential for violence escalates while the raw materials degrade and actions fragment, stutter or overlap.
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Shayna ConnellyDirectorEvery Ghost Has an Orchestra, Yours is Not the Taj Mahal, Gardening at Night, Quiver
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Travis DuffieldSound Mix
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Project Type:Experimental, Short
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Runtime:4 minutes 36 seconds
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Completion Date:January 1, 2019
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Production Budget:250 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:N/A
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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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Oxford Film FestivalOxford, MS
February 7, 2019 -
Festival Transterritorial de Cine UndergroundBuenos Aires
Argentina -
Pleasure DomeToronto
Canada -
Athens International Film FestivalAthens, OH
April 11, 2019
Ohio Premiere -
Cadaqués Shortfilm FestivalCadaqués
Italy
April 14, 2019 -
Tlanchana FestMetepec, Toluca and Valle de Bravo
Mexico
April 4, 2019 -
Splice Film FestBrooklyn, NY
June 20, 2019 -
Altan Khalis International Film FestivalUlaanbaatar
Mongolia
June 6, 2019 -
Far Out Film FestNashville, TN
June 21, 2019 -
Walthamstow International Film FestivalLondon
United Kingdom
June 15, 2019 -
London Experimental Film FestivalLondon
United Kingdom
August 16, 2019 -
Mosaic International Film FestivalRockford, IL
September 14, 2019 -
Balkan Can KinoAthens
Greece -
Darkroom Film FestivalLondon
United Kingdom
September 28, 2019 -
Girona Film FestivalGirona
Spain
September 24, 2019 -
The Artists Forum Festival of the Moving ImageNew York, NY
Nominated for Best Experimental Film -
Antimatter [Media Art]Victoria
Canada
October 16, 2019 -
Planet 9 Film FestivalHamatrack, MI
October 21, 2019 -
Stuff MXMexico City
Mexico
November 7, 2019 -
Retransmision Film Festival (Tour)various
Mexico
Touring Festival -
Melbourne Underground Film FestivalMelbourne
Australia
November 15, 2019 -
VideodrunkToronto
Canada
November 30, 2019 -
South Texas UndergroundCorpus Christi, TX
January 25, 2020 -
RPM Film FestivalBoston, MA
February 3, 2020 -
Grrl Haus CinemaBerlin
Germany -
We Make Movies International Film FestivalLos Angeles, CA
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Threadbare Mitten Film FestivalLansing, MI
September 3, 2020
Shayna Connelly is a filmmaker based in Chicago whose work explores hauntings, liminality and the boundaries between documentary, experimental and fiction filmmaking. Inspired by a book on haunted houses shelved in the non-fiction section of her childhood library, Connelly’s lifelong obsession with ghosts led her to explore trauma, place, identity and the link between fear and desire. Her hybrid approach to cinema questions the strict categorization of film modes and genres. She enjoys breaking cinematic rules regarding character, action and structure while exploring subjectivity, surrealism and abstraction.
Her films have won awards at Big Muddy Film Festival, Berlin Short Film Festival, Cinepocalypse, Women in Horror Film Festival, The Artists' Forum Festival of the Moving Image, Milwaukee Women's Film Festival, Columbus International and IC Docs. FUCKED UP POINT BLANK is the 7th in an eight film series called A MEMORY PALACE FOR GHOSTS. Films in the series have screened at over 200 festivals including Palm Springs International ShortsFest, Chicago Underground, Sydney Underground, San Diego Underground, Brooklyn Film Festival, Antimatter, Chicago Feminist Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival and Athens International among others. Newcity Magazine named her one of Chicago's 50 Screen Gems in 2016 and 2018.
The dread produced by individual and cultural anxieties pervades modern life to the point where we must address it in others as much as in ourselves. FUCKED UP POINT BLANK arose by chance when a failed rip of John Boorman's 1967 revenge thriller offered the appropriate raw material for a film idea about interacting with other people’s anxious outbursts. Anxiety presents as anger and creates a barrier between a person and the world. Their perceptions are altered and their decisions are reduced to fight-or-flight. In this heightened state, the stories they tell themselves perpetuate rather than soothe the dangers they perceive.
Trying to affect found footage is parallel to coaxing someone out of an anxious state. There are limits to what you can alter in an existing story without going outside of it, but when the story someone is telling themselves is untrue and harmful, revision is imperative. There is a limit to the amount of rewriting we can do with an existing story. In editing or in working with an anxious person I must uncover and embrace the established structure, characters and tone while repurposing them enough to reveal something new. Something hopeful or at the very least different.