Alliance for Independent Motion Media: American Ruins

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Filmmaker: Jeff Sias

American Ruins

Film Description

An unusual journey … way off the beaten path

AMERICAN RUINS is a feature length road trip through the rapidly vanishing industrial relics and ghost towns of Abandoned America. The United States is only now old enough to have its own ruins. Ruins are unique in this country because our culture does not celebrate them – it actively seeks to forget them. America did not build great pyramids, castles, or temples. It instead built factories, tenements, railroads and asylums. They are symbols of progress rather than permanence, and they were discarded when progress moved on. Experimental in nature, this film is a non–narrative, non–narrated filmic impression in the tradition of KOYAANISQUATSI and BARAKA. It is a scrapbook of vignettes, found places and memories highlighting the unusual graphic beauty of derelict space. We plan to commission several well known musicians of varying styles (both contemporary and traditional) to create unique scores and soundscapes for each location. In this way the film might become something of a decomposed FANTASIA. It is important to note that this film will likely be one of the only preservation documents of some of these amazing, uniquely American structures before they are demolished or paved over with sprawl.

© 2006 The Alliance for Independent Motion Media

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