Screen Siren Pictures Inc.

Four Walls

An Interactive multimedia and online installation by Brian Johnson

“Any city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich.” – Plato

4 Walls will be an Altman-esque ensemble piece, four characters, four converging narrative threads, four acts, four simultaneously visible screens, and four collaborating users. Each user controls the narrative arch of one of the four principal characters, triggering the playback of individual shots or sequences while simultaneously creating/collaborating in the score of the greater narrative. They do this by interfacing with an online representation of one of a number of musical instruments. Each note that is selected on a given instrument is linked to a particular shot within each act. The challenge for users is to find a happy medium between musical and narrative coherence.

This story is about four people whose lives become increasingly intertwined as the geographic and social space of the city they live in collapses around them. Manjit, who has recently immigrated to Vancouver in order to attend grad school, struggles with a culture that seems cold and unwelcoming. Paul’s company has recently purchased Manjit’s run down apartment building, now he much evict him on the eve of his family’s arrival from India. Meanwhile Manjit has been helping Heather recover files she has lost on her computer – complex soundscapes charting neighborhoods within the city. One of the neighborhoods she frequents is the run down area where her sister has been of late sleeping on the street.

The psychic damage each character suffers begins to be redirected towards those around them. Like mice overpopulating in an enclosed space, the animosity between individuals intensifies as their proximity to one another becomes apparent. What could be a matrix of healthy relationships is denied due to issues of class, bigotry, and trust. The characters must recognize their complicity with the forces that cause other’s pain. Only then is there the hope of a more essential reconciliation, healing, and the creation of community.

My Dangerous Loverboy

“I thought he loved me. He was exciting, gave me presents, alcohol, and had a wicked car. The one day I woke up naked in a strange town, with no mobile, no money, nothing….Life became a blur. I was passed from one man to another. I couldn’t see how the nightmare would ever end.” Jade, 13 years old.

My Dangerous Loverboy aims to raise awareness of global internal sex trafficking and engage with vulnerable young girls through an interactive website and ground breaking mobile site. Working closely with community outreach partners, we aim to empower our target audience of ‘at risk’ young girls and their wider peer group (12 – 18 year olds) to tell their stories, warn others of potential dangers, and gain the self esteem that will enable them to make choices about their lives.

Throughout the UK, Canada and many other countries around the world, thousands of young girls are being groomed into sex slavery. Initially acting as a “boyfriend”, older men introduce impressionable and vulnerable young girls (sometimes as young as 12 years old) into a world of clothes, drugs and fast cars. The attention given to the girls is intoxicating and they do not recognize the danger signs. They are usually unaware of what is happening to them until it’s too late and they are forced to have sex with groups of older men.

My Dangerous Loverboy aims to provide these marginalized girls with the tools to tell their stories. Using a combination of web based content, mobile, short film, documentary and user generated content, My Dangerous Loverboy will reach out and creatively engage with marginalized girls and their wider peer group in a way not possible before.

Clearcut

Clearcut is an erotically charged drama that navigates the uncharted sexual tension between two men and the woman who appears to want them both.

When rough-hewn loner Earley Ritter picks up a hitchhiker one rainy night, he can’t imagine how much it will change his life. A “shake-rat” who salvages cedar stumps left over from clearcut logging, Earley seems to have little in common with Reed Alton, a skinny Stanford university dropout. But when Earley meets Zan, the fiery and mysterious woman Reed has been following, erotic sparks fly in unexpected directions. Thrown together in the splendid isolation of the woods, with passions and tensions mounting, the unlikely trio achieves a fragile balance that – like their idyllic patch of forest – will force a choice.

Using the metaphor of the forestry industry, with its own self-imposed blindness, Earley’s story is of a man who meets the nature of his own desire face to face. In the end, it is only through the intervention and sacrifice of a woman that he can accept the love of another man. At once a psychological drama and a colourful exploration of an unspoken intimacy, Clearcut explores the boundaries that divide us, and what it takes to cross them.

To the Wedding

Based on the novel by John Berger, To The Wedding demonstrates that even the cruelest of fates can be endured and transcended through courage, love, and determination.

Taking place in continental Europe on the eve of the 21st century, it’s a world where everything’s changing and not even the certainties of love are exempt.

Beautiful, vibrant Ninon meets and has a whirlwind romance with a young Italian named Gino. But her life abruptly changes when she tests positive for HIV, the legacy of a brief encounter years earlier. She desperately tries to break off the relationship, but Gino will have none of it. In an act of passionate and redemptive love he insists on marrying Ninon despite her illness. Their stories mesh and intercut with those of Ninon’s parents as they travel towards their daughter. Her father John, full of grief, rides his motorcycle along windy European roads, stopping occasionally to offer prayers to a roadside Madonna or ruminate on the future with young computer hackers. Her mother Zdena, a Slovakian intellectual, buys a thrush whistle, evocative of happier times before politics forced her to leave her daughter years earlier, before boarding a bus for Italy. Ninon fights her love for Gino, struggles with her new found status and eventually embraces both.

Finally all arrive at the wedding itself. Set in a little village on the Po River Delta in Italy, it becomes a magical feast in which all the lost and searching souls are drawn together in the bittersweet embrace of Gino and Ninon’s timeless love.

Both tragic and joyous, intelligent and erotic, To The Wedding is a transcendent celebration of passion at the end of the last millennium.

The Leper’s Bell

An ambitious young lawyer gets more than he bargained for when he accepts a mysterious job by an American construction firm operating in the fictional country of Kashiqstan. Incredibly naïve, he believes he is supporting pro-democratic initiatives to re-build the country after civil war; however, the money and power soon compromise his judgment and objectivity. As he begins to lose his moral compass, his ill-fated decision to cover-up a hideous crime he inadvertently commits threatens the stability of his company, the security of the country, and his fragile relationship with his own family.

Adapted from the eponymous novel by Paul Micou, The Leper’s Bell boasts a familiar, if not deliciously dark Faustian tale of one man’s unbridled ambition and the lengths he will go to for position and power. Part political thriller and part morality play, The Leper’s Bell is an evocative, timely story about corruption that certainly proves the age-old quote that “absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The actual quote precedes a second sentence; “great men are almost always bad men,” which is almost more telling than the first.

Harsh Sun

Grace is like any other teenage girl, trying to find her voice in the world, but when your world is AIDS ravaged Africa, you learn to speak even louder.

Grace Adwek is a young girl with a mission. On her own in the world with no family, she dreams of one day  becoming a writer.  Leaving behind her  friends at the tea plantation where she and her mother worked, Grace moves to the city for a new tutoring job. Her strong work ethic and feisty disposition impress her boss, Daudi, an “educated abroad” Kenyan, torn between his loyalties to his country and the corruption surrounding him. But when his frustration releases itself, he rapes Grace, forcing her into the streets of Nairobi with no money.

Navigating the gridlock and pulse of the slum, Grace makes several friends, including Surfer Girl and her pack of ‘Chokoro’, (charcoal) street kids who live off the profits from recycling choice finds from the city’s sprawling dump.  She is drawn to Tonza, an easy-going and flirtatious 19 year-old bus driver who introduces Grace to his sister Rose, a prostitute. Together, Grace, Tonza, Rose and Nozwe, a two year-old orphan infected with HIV, improvise a makeshift family, helping each other out.

Nozwe’s disease progresses rapidly and despite honorable attempts of medical assistance by Joanna, a British AIDS researcher, Nozwe dies. Deeply concerned for Rose’s welfare, Grace convinces Rose to participate in Joanna’s vaccine study, in exchange for any medical coverage she may need. Grace is relieved to hear that Rose has inexplicably managed to show immunity to the rampant HIV virus, but her world caves in when Grace finds out she is HIV positive.

After going through what seems insurmountable hardship, Grace is forced to make a choice: will she become one of the countless, faceless, forgotten victims, or will she stand up and speak out? More than anything, she learns to overcome her fear of being rejected, learning that her greatest gift is to allow herself to be human, to be loved.

Jua Kali (Harsh Sun) is a stark and moving example of the reality facing over 25 million AIDS orphans in Africa today, as Grace learns to find her voice in a world where she would normally be silenced.