Beginning October 2017, THEMUSEUM will present Model Citizens featuring two disparate yet playfully connected photography-based exhibitions, Awkward Family Photos and Whose Reality Is It?, that provoke dialogue about our connections with technology, digital media and ultimately each other.
THEMUSEUM, which built a reputation on provoking conversation with its relevant and often controversial exhibitions, will present dynamic dialogues each Wednesday during the exhibition. The Model Citizens Dialogues will consist of speakers, panels and films to complement these two contemporary exhibitions that aim to engage the community in a discussion around the impact of technology on our shared social experiences, including a screening of the short film, Mann, followed by a Q&A with Kyle Sawyer, the film’s director.
About the Film:
A mannequin lives alone in a beige apartment in a gated community of identical beige apartments. Each day of his repetitive life he must avoid a set of stairs on his way to work with a great sigh. He is not blessed with human mobility. He cannot eat, he cannot run, he cannot climb stairs. At a nondescript Nashville clothing store, it’s clear he’s fallen for his spritely coworker, and incidentally his closest human contact, but the connection is not mutual, it cannot be because he can never let her know. He comes to this realization and silently searches for his own place and purpose in the scorched American south.
About Kyle Sawyer:
Cambridge native Kyle Sawyer studied film and psychology at Wilfrid Laurier University. Since 2011, he’s worked on TV, documentary, film and commercial sets around the world and found time to make four short films and the feature film “Victory,” which premiered in Toronto in 2015. His short film “Mann”, filmed last year in Nashville, TN, has played at Cinefest Sudbury and the Forest City Film Festival in London, ON.
“Mann is a film I had been thinking about making since 2011. I was/am still making films with no budgets, so it started with a ‘hey, it would be super easy to get dolly shots using escalators” and ended up where it is today, six years later, a story about a mannequin tormented by stairs. It went unmade for so long because I was always thinking of it as music video and waited several years for the right band and song which never came. After making the music for ‘Victory’ ourselves, I thought why not just score Mann too? The last piece of the puzzle was Nashville. I had been working there on and off for more than a year and it just seemed like the right place to tell the story of a character that doesn’t fit in to normal every day life. The American south comes preset with a ’normal, everyday western-life,’ context. In our mannequins case, he is physically limited. He wants to be mobile like the rest of us, and that’s his driving force. Really though, it translates to any limitation a human may have, physically, mental, real or imagined. He’s just a sad guy on a search for meaning like the rest of us, and even though he can only make one facial expression, I hope his journey lends some perspective.: – Kyle Sawyer, Writer and Director of Mann.
Admission: Pay What You Can (PWYC), with a suggested donation of $10.
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