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.

  • Shayna Connelly
    Director
    Every Ghost Has an Orchestra, Yours is Not the Taj Mahal, Gardening at Night, Quiver
  • Travis Duffield
    Sound Mix
  • Project Type:
    Experimental, Short
  • Runtime:
    4 minutes 36 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    January 1, 2019
  • Production Budget:
    250 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    United States
  • Country of Filming:
    United States
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    N/A
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Oxford Film Festival
    Oxford, MS
    February 7, 2019
  • Festival Transterritorial de Cine Underground
    Buenos Aires
    Argentina
  • Pleasure Dome
    Toronto
    Canada
  • Athens International Film Festival
    Athens, OH
    April 11, 2019
    Ohio Premiere
  • Cadaqués Shortfilm Festival
    Cadaqués
    Italy
    April 14, 2019
  • Tlanchana Fest
    Metepec, Toluca and Valle de Bravo
    Mexico
    April 4, 2019
  • Splice Film Fest
    Brooklyn, NY
    June 20, 2019
  • Altan Khalis International Film Festival
    Ulaanbaatar
    Mongolia
    June 6, 2019
  • Far Out Film Fest
    Nashville, TN
    June 21, 2019
  • Walthamstow International Film Festival
    London
    United Kingdom
    June 15, 2019
  • London Experimental Film Festival
    London
    United Kingdom
    August 16, 2019
  • Mosaic International Film Festival
    Rockford, IL
    September 14, 2019
  • Balkan Can Kino
    Athens
    Greece
  • Darkroom Film Festival
    London
    United Kingdom
    September 28, 2019
  • Girona Film Festival
    Girona
    Spain
    September 24, 2019
  • The Artists Forum Festival of the Moving Image
    New York, NY
    Nominated for Best Experimental Film
  • Antimatter [Media Art]
    Victoria
    Canada
    October 16, 2019
  • Planet 9 Film Festival
    Hamatrack, MI
    October 21, 2019
  • Stuff MX
    Mexico City
    Mexico
    November 7, 2019
  • Retransmision Film Festival (Tour)
    various
    Mexico
    Touring Festival
  • Melbourne Underground Film Festival
    Melbourne
    Australia
    November 15, 2019
  • Videodrunk
    Toronto
    Canada
    November 30, 2019
  • South Texas Underground
    Corpus Christi, TX
    January 25, 2020
  • RPM Film Festival
    Boston, MA
    February 3, 2020
  • Grrl Haus Cinema
    Berlin
    Germany
  • We Make Movies International Film Festival
    Los Angeles, CA
  • Threadbare Mitten Film Festival
    Lansing, MI
    September 3, 2020
Director Biography - Shayna Connelly

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.

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Director Statement

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.