Sundance 2010: Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman's CATFISH

The most-talked-about documentary of Sundance 2010 thus far appears to be a film that, perhaps surprisingly, is playing out of competition and that appears to have taken most everyone by surprise at its first public screening on Friday.  Word-of-mouth has been so good that Saturday's press and industry screening was SRO with some notables twittering that they couldn't get in.

The film is Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman's CATFISH and it's screening in the fest's new Spotlight section - or "films we love" according to doc prorgramming specialist David Courier and Caroline Libresco.  According to Mike Fleming (newly ex-Variety and now at Nikke Finke's Deadline), several buyers are circling the film.

Marshall Fine sets the stage for Friday's screening:

"Here’s the beauty of a festival like this: You can walk into a movie knowing virtually nothing about it – and come away with a startling and unexpected experience like “Catfish” that you just want to rave about.

A documentary by directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, this film charts an Internet relationship that Schulman’s brother, Yaniv, found himself drawn into, which the filmmakers began documenting with an array of video cameras, mostly of the low-rez variety. I won’t say much about the plot, other than it is a film whose emotional journey is wholly unexpected and which takes the viewer on a ride he can never anticipate. Visually, it’s as low-tech as a movie can be – but these filmmakers prove that, with the right story, the images are in service to something much, much larger."

Jay A. Fernandez follows up for the Hollywood Reporter:

"The film — its narrative shot in chronological real-time as it unfolded — touches on the nature of digital relationships and what we seek in them, as well as how lost dreams can corrupt our sense of identity. And it manages to comment on the inexplicable hold strange love can have on us, even after it is revealed to be something… unfathomably different than we thought."

Writing at the LA Times, Tim Swanson:

"But what makes this documentary, which is attracting some buyer interest and was greeted in its first screening by a rare standing ovation, so emotionally potent isn't just its commentary on the complications of modern binary relationships; it's the humanity that the filmmakers unearth when they travel to Abby's home and meet the family face-to-face. Many novice documentarians might have turned off the red light as soon as different versions of Internet identities become fleshed out. But the filmmakers' persistence and compassionate questioning ultimately reveal not only our collective capacity for self-deception, but also the notion that true interpersonal connection comes not from showing our strengths, but from exposing our weaknesses."

Continues IFC's Alison Willmore:

"CATFISH was filmed on the fly, with cameras sometimes planted on tables or car dashboards, but that haphazardness, and the transparency of the discussions of when and what it's okay to shoot make sense. The story's nicely broken up with Google Earth sequences in which we swoop from the Manhattan loft shared by Nev and the filmmakers down to Abby and Angela's address. It reinforces that it's become so easy to, say, zoom in on an image of someone's house, but not really know who lives there, or to learn about someone's innermost thoughts, but not have any actual idea of what that person's life is like. In that way, the narrative "Catfish" ends up spinning is one of a sort of sad, unusual love story."

Alicia Van Couvering interviews the directors for Filmmaker. 

Comments

[Amanda O]

I was lucky enough to be at the Sundance premiere. It was a fabulous treat to witness the unfolding of not only a crazy modern tale but also the great grace of these young artists.

[jazz]

Check out the trailer for Catfish, the Sundance hit documentary, is poised to be the most controversial film of 2010 because it exposes the grim reality of our modern world. http://bit.ly/anE6RZ

[Kavad]

Without having watched it yet Jazz I agree. I think Catfish is going to make people think twice about online dating and who and what info they share with people they hardly know. It can happen to anyone really... http://bit.ly/b4vCGa

[Jimmy Doyle]

I was fortunate enough to be able to watch Catfish last night and I thought it was a wonderful film that captured how social networking can promise so much yet deliver so little. This type of thing can happen as evidenced by Nev's journey to uncover the truth about his "Facebook Family" - a truth while a tad unsettling, becomes poignant in an end of movie analogy. Great film.