Do you know about the Zenith Conspiracy?
This massive governmental and corporate subterfuge has – luckily – been tracked in a series of tapes, being found and posted online in forums and websites devoted to the cause.
CS:LA is giving you a chance to learn about the conspiracy — and the people it has affected — in a film that Flavorwire called “A visually stunning art-house Blade Runner.”
Thursday, February 10th, 6:00PM
The Downtown Independent Theatre
Zenith is a retro-futuristic steam-punk thriller, about two men in two time periods, whose search for the same grand conspiracy leads them to question their own humanity. Starting from a fictional recreation of Stanley Milgram’s Obedience to Authority experiment, Zenith plunges into exploring multifaceted dimensions of the human experience. The film follows two parallel stories – of father and son – now, and 40 years into the future. Searching for the same elusive conspiracy, both father and son find no answers; instead, their journeys unravel their lives and force them to look deep and hard at themselves and their surroundings. In the end, they are both confronted with the same Faustian bargain – but each one chooses a very different path.
TRANSMEDIA CAMPAIGN:
Above and beyond being a really good film, Zenith has the added benefit of being awesomely au-courant with its marketing and story development strategies.
What do we mean by this? Well the filmmakers have developed a very strong transmedia component, alongside the film itself… On August 31, 2010, Above Top Secret posted a thread offering a $500 reward for the first individual to correctly identify the purpose behind the website for the fictitious company Wadget Industries. Through a maze of websites, users quickly discovered that Wadjet Industries was related to a new film by director Vladan Nikolic, and that the goal of the alternate reality game was to find online video clips of Ed Crowley’s tapes, edit them together, and upload them via YouTube to the film’s promotional website, www.stopzenith.com.
Like this:
Filed under: Screening, transmedia, Vladan Nikolic, Zenith
your curatorial choices are always awesome! I wish we could collaborate doing a film program or event together.
You had me at retro-futuristic steam-punk thriller.
Pros: This film is so awesome, it makes hippies cry on sight.
Cons: I still haven’t been able to find the Revive The Dead (RTD) button. I know it’s there, along with the other button that goes “PING!”….