Set in Brooklyn, in a near future, David is an advertising executive with a pretty tamed private life. He becomes in charge of developing a marketing campaign for a pair of Augmented Reality glasses, baptized Augmenta. This eyewear allows the user to create avatars, a function which David soon uses to give life to a virtual version of his best friend’s girlfriend, Sophie, on whom he has a crush. At the same time, his yoga-instructor girlfriend, Juliette, is having an existential crisis and adopts a lifestyle that pushes them further apart from each other. His abuse of alcohol and drugs, as well as his new virtual lover, will worsen things for David, and eventually, his situation ends up spiralling out of control. When the real and the surreal collide, David ventures onto dangerous grounds. A film about new technologies, design, fashion and lives as modern as they are chaotic. Lives driven by a reality that overcomes them and against which they have to fight to regain some control before it eats them alive.
Creative Control is a feature with a narrative and a style combining the most classic with the uttermost modern to show us a way of living based around technologies, parallel realities, hallucinogenic substances and the desire to have what we can’t possess, while we neglect what we have, what is ours, what we love. Its plot could be taken from a Black Mirror episode, yet with a beautiful black and white cinematography, a slow-paced rhythm (to the point where some critics talk about an influence of Antonioni) and even an obvious tribute to Kubrick. The film confronts us to a reality both modern and nearing, in which values and goals are unclear, for they get lost amongst all the things we get caught up in on a daily basis. A controversial feature that won’t leave anybody indifferent, as it mirrors to the viewer a portrait that is hard to accept.
2015: SXSW Film Festival – Special Jury Award for visual excellence.
2015: Denver International Film Festival
2016: National Board of Review (NBR): Top Ten Independent Films
2016: Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema
2016: Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival
Year: 2015
Runtime: 97 min
Country: USA
Direction: Benjamin Dickinson
Screenplay: Micah Bloomberg, Benjamin Dickinson
Cinematography: Adam Newport-Berra
OST: Drazen Bosnjak
Cast: Benjamin Dickinson, Nora Zehetner, Dan Gill
Genre: Drama, Science Fiction
Language: English
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Subtitles: Festival Films
Contact: Festival Films