This year, VCAM & RETN are partnering with the Vermont International Film Festival in the screening of the film Four Eyed Monsters. The film will play on the festival’s opening night — Thursday October 11 at 7:00 pm.  The film’s after-party will be held here at the VCAM studio. Because Four Eyed Monsters screens on the festival’s opening night, the after-party will double as the opening night party of the whole festival!

VCAM and RETN are thrilled to help bring this film to Burlington. It is a wonderful example of user-generated media-making — our stock-in-trade in the PEG access world. It’s an autobiographical film about two young New Yorkers (Susan Buice and Arin Crumley, the film’s co-directors, who play themselves in the film) who meet and decide to avoid all the trite conventions of courtship — like spoken language. The film is peppered with the actual video and still images the couple took of themselves as they met, dated, broke apart, came back together, and made the film itself. It’s incredibly raw and real and intensely voyeuristic in its tone.

Filmmaker Magazine has called Buice and Crumley part of the “mumblecore” indy film movement, which Wikipedia describes as, “an American independent film movement that arose in the mid-2000’s. It is primarily characterized by ultra-low budget production (often employing digital video cameras), focus on personal relationships between twenty-somethings, improvised scripts, and non-professional actors.”

Four Eyed Monsters was released for free under a Creative Commons license for a limited time on YouTube.  It was nominated for two 2007 Independent Spirit Awards and it took home the Special Audience Award at the SXSW film Festival in 2005.

Co-director Susan Buice will attend the screening and (we hope) the after-party here at VCAM.  Both events happen on Thursday evening, October 11.  The film will screen at the Waterfront Theater downtown at 7:00 pm and the party gets underway immediately afterwards here at VCAM.  Hope to see you there!