The Making of Flat Earther

A found documentary uncovering aliens, conspiracies, paranoia, and one man's journey to insanity.

In 1993, Sam Fuller takes Jim Jarmusch on a trip into Brazil's Mato Grosso, up the River Araguaia to the village of Santa Isabel Do Morro, where 40 years before, Zanuck had sent Fuller to scout a location and write a script for a movie based on a tigrero, a jaguar hunter. Sam hopes to find people who remember him, and he takes film he shot in 1954. He's Rip Van Winkle, and, indeed, a great deal changed in the village. There are televisions, watches, and brick houses. But, the same Karajá culture awaits as well. He gathers the villagers to show his old film footage, and people recognize friends and relatives, thanking Fuller for momentarily bringing them back to life.

The Romanian penitentiary system allows, from 2006, the marriage of people sentenced to serve time in prison. Most of the inmates cultivate the pre-existing relationships with the concubines or partners who live outside the prison walls. Though, there is a special category, of those who find a life partner during their time in prison. VISITING ROOM follows the stories of some prisoners found in different penitentiaries across the country, who have found their life partner during their sentence time. The one is either a person from outside, or as them, a person who is serving time in prison. Our intention was to talk to the people found in the special situation of being deprived of freedom, to whom love becomes a substitute for freedom and represents maybe their only hope for a better future. Adi and Ana started their relationship after Adi had seen her in a photo received by his cell mate. It was enough to start a long course of letters, forced meetings in which they sue each other for fictive reasons. The legal system must take the allegations seriously and try to prove them. Mihai has seen Eva on TV and insisted to meet her; they told each other their life stories and ended up confessing their love and planning to get married without ever seeing each other face to face. Cristina and Constantin Baron have been for the past two years in a tumultuous relationship. They met in prison at a show, got married, fought through letters and were close to a divorce, although they are detained in different penitentiaries and only met for their conjugal visits. The movie is built as a chain of interviews in which different couples confess their love stories, re-confirm their love and expose their plans for the future. Without the hope of finding the answer, VISITING ROOM tries to ask one question. What makes two people who have never seen each other, to write in a letter: I love you very much. You are my life!

Eoghan is a sound recordist who is returning to Ireland for the first time in 15 years. His reason for returning is a job offer: to find and record places free from man-made sound. His quest takes him away from towns and villages into remote terrain. Throughout his journey, he is drawn into a series of encounters and conversations which gradually divert his attention towards a more intangible silence, one that is bound up with the sounds of the life he had left behind. Influenced by elements of folklore and archive, Silence unfolds with a quiet intensity, where poetic images reveal an absorbing meditation on themes relating to sound and silence, history, memory and exile.

Real-life drama about why, in a beautiful and quirky rural town, film- maker Jez Lewis' childhood friends are killing themselves. Beginning with a personal quest for understanding, the film moves into a year-long drama of human tragedy and redemption as principal character Cass comes to terms with his own mortality and attempts to lift himself out of his cycle of self-destruction. This core narrative carves an upward arc through an intimate study of a place often described as paradise, but which harbours an undertow of lethal hedonism and disillusionment. As people continue to kill themselves during the making of the film, a maelstrom of conflicting values throws up unexpected truths about the human condition.