Prison Valley: A new form for docs?
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If you have a fast internet connection and a few hours to spare, one of the most interesting documentary projects to come around lately is the French “web documentary” PRISON VALLEY. Fast Company wrote an article about it in May, and it’s been mentioned on sites like the NYTimes Lens Blog and 10,000 Words but I haven’t observed much chatter on the US doc scene.
Due to slow/old personal computing resources, my own experiences of the documentary have been incomplete, but what I have seen really piques my curiosity. It’s a new way of approaching documentary that is entirely informed by the way the Web is being used at its most cutting-edge: you might say, a documentary for the 21st century. It completely incorporates social media and divides up video sections into bite-sized bits—so you’re never staring at your screen without “interacting” for more than a few minutes.
According to Fast Company, the film cost $300,000 to make—not an insignificant sum. I wonder if the funding is available for a US film of this nature. Equally important, is the audience there? We are used to having our stories fed to us in a linear fashion by Hollywood and television—do we have the intellectual curiosity to meet a project like this halfway? And in a country where high speed internet is far from the norm, how many people could take advantage of the opportunity?
All of these questions of course ignore the content of the project, which looks, through French lenses, at a Colorado town where the prison industry is king. Check out the “film” yourself at http://prisonvalley.arte.tv or read more about it at the blog, http://prisonvalley.arte.tv/blog/en/.
by Mattie Akers
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| Posted on June 29, 2010
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