*We've made it, but we're still accepting contributions*
Thanks to amazing support from friends old and new, we've passed the 100% mark with a few hours to go. But don't let that discourage you from contributing! Our completion process is not a fixed rate, and any further funds we raise will benefit the film - enabling us to invest more in the editing and sound, and to get the film to more festivals and in front of bigger audiences. If you came this far, it would also be great to link up with you to keep you updated about the future of the movie:
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Thanks!Two lost souls on a 36 hour date
Hana is an ASMR* superstar who has millions of fans around the world, but hasn’t left the house for 18 months.
Ed monitors CCTV footage on his laptop for a living and hasn’t slept since an industrial accident resulted in his skull being patched up with a metal plate.
Hana meets Ed on a dating site and invites him over for dinner. They can cook, laugh, drink, learn to trust each other without her needing to leave the house. A perfect plan... if our heroes were perfect.
Made In Sarajevo
Filmmaker Graeme Cole brings together two of his favourite on-screen collaborators to make a film that probes the meaning of intimacy and trust and does not shy away from exposing the ridiculousness of human beings (especially when we’re trying to look our best).
Working under the mentorship of Béla Tarr
at the Hungarian auteur’s film.factory in Sarajevo, Murmurs is being carefully
crafted by a small international team of artists to produce a funny and
hypnotic romance with a bittersweet tang. As film.factory students, the crew were honoured to have workshops with some of the greatest living filmmakers, including Guy Maddin, Gus Van Sant, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Carlos Reygadas, Pedro Costa, Cristian Mungiu and the Quay Brothers, in the months leading up to the production.
Murmurs borrows from the conventions of ASMR videos to create a fictional world that is both stylized and familiar. It has the intimate ‘filmmaker next door’ feel that Graeme has previously cultivated in movies such as his musical It’s Nick’s Birthday, or his cardboard-and-glue adventure series Universal Ear.
Your Support
Principle shooting on the project has wrapped, but we urgently need your support to complete the movie and bring it to audiences at festivals and online. Your help will enable us to do the following:
- Shoot additional scenes
- Edit the final film
- Colour correction, compositing and effects
- Sound design and mixing
- Marketing and distribution
Murmurs is a simple concept with a complex production. Most of the scenes aside from Hana’s ASMR videos are shot on two cameras, and will be presented in split screen to tweak the sense of intimacy and the disharmony of our heroes’ experiences.
The sound design will be fine-tuned to take advantage of Hana and Ed’s intimate shared soundscape, playing on the ASMR triggers both in Hana’s videos and as we follow their date. We also need to create and integrate backgrounds for Hana’s green-screened videos.
Our excellent post-production team are working for reduced rates, but for such a complex project we need to invest in time and facilities to bring the film to completion soon and to the standard its audience deserves.
Like all of Graeme’s films, Murmurs has been carefully designed to make a positive feature of its low budget. We just need a bit more to get us to the finish line.
Perks and Thanks
We’ve put together some great perks for your donations, some ASMR-themed and others related to the film’s wider themes and connections. If there’s any other way you’d like to help – by offering services or additional rewards, for example – please get in touch. And of course, the more you can share our campaign with your friends and communities, the greater the investment in the film.
Goals
If we don’t reach our target, the show will go on! We always find a way, and any funds raised will help to take Murmurs from one stage to the next. We already have a lot of great material in the can, we just need your help to finish the best we can. And if we exceed our target? It will help us further publicise the film, distribute and if it's enough... consider expanding the Murmurs universe with new spin-offs and extras.
A note from the filmmaker
With Murmurs, I wanted to experiment with the feeling of intimacy in the movies, but to apply my ideas and reflections to characters who would be willing to wrestle them away from intellectualism. Actors Elma and Lockwood were – as ever – game to be experimented with, and they bring a great deal of their own ridiculous selves to these characters: two lost souls trying to do what hot-blooded and romantic souls always have with each other – share body warmth, catch a knowing glance, and hopefully some heavy petting. Very straightforwardly, Hana is a recluse who broadcasts herself to the world, and Ed is a globetrotter whose attention is fixed firmly on his computer screen. I was interested to play with the ways our wired worlds are failing to precisely rewire our bodies and minds, and to reveal the beautiful, clumsy animal-robots swimming about in the amniotic fluid of the internet age.
You can see some of my previous films here.
International crew
Made within the community of Sarajevo's film.factory, Murmurs has benefited from the generous collaboration of some of the most promising filmmakers of their generation, including:
Aleksandra Niemczyk (Poland/Norway) - Producer, Art Director and Cinematographer
Ghazi Alqudcy (Singapore) - Cinematographer
Namsuk Kim (South Korea) - Sound Recording
Luciano Pérez Savoy (Mexico) - Sound Recording
Stijn Bouma (Netherlands) - Additional Photography
Michael Cacioppo Belantara (USA) - Sound Design and Mixing
>>Interested in learning more about ASMR? Visit www.asmruniversity.com<<
Graeme's participation on the film.factory program is made possible by the kind support of Nicholas D. Hill, Brian Caswell, MUBI.com, Lyn Goleby, Bob and Lesley Cole, and his long-suffering parents Maureen & John.
Whether you contribute or not, we'd love to stay in touch with you on our social media platforms (below or here).
