Who killed Mary Smith?

[npcoombs]

I was walking to work today listening to 'Palace Brothers' and it all came to me, my first real film inspiration in over a year - a sudden flash and a rush of joy - to finally be delivered inspiration, as if from nowhere. Over the course of the day the pieces have started to fall into place and I now have the rough outline for my 3 hour narrative-fictional-documentary. This was inspired by a question I set me friend 'Can you have a documentary in which all the characters are actors and the whole story is false'?

Im not sure if this film answers that question, but I do believe it pushes the fusion of documentary/fiction truth/falsity to its limits.

The film open as a mound of rubbish bags is being cleared by rubbish collectors and after some time it is revealed that a pale naked body is among the rubbish. Our off-screen narrator is apologizing to Mary Smith... over and over again that this should happen to her. That she was his hope, his last hope and now she has gone a great pain and suffering will overcome the world. But he doesn't know how this happened to her. He has his theories, alternate scenarios, he believes that every consequence is part of something greater, a reflection of the entirety of the world.

Our narrator decides to track her down from the early scraps of information he has. As he travels and follows her leads we find that Mary Smith was involved in all the worlds events during the 1980s and 1990s. She was a Forrest Gump, an idealist traveling the world with sheer joyfulness and passion, but as the world changed this driftwood moved with the times and entered into an epic, spiralling traffic. It is the narrator's hypothesis as the film goes on that in Mary Smith's death we find a reflection of the death of the world, of hope and idealism, but the conspiratorial links between events and the willingness of the narrator to believe that Mary was involved in certain events and in conflicting accounts cast doubts upon the reliability of our narrator. In fact as the film goes on we are increasingly unsure about the reliability of the images too as elements of the construction of the film and journey are revealed to be ad hoc and false. Despite this, the sheer force of the evocation of Mary's passion and downfall and empathy drags us across continents and decades until the final act in which she is taken into forced prostitution. Then certain elements start to be revealed, which indicate that all Mary Smith ever was, was a prostitute and the narrator is lost, ensnared in circles of interpretation which increasingly part ways with what we see and feel.

The style throughout is documentary. There are no on-screen actors, but some interviewees acting their lines. The visuals are documentary glances at the world that refract the narrative and the world events which Mary was involved with are brought back via the use of archive footage, which the narrator then explores as tracing a long-lost crime scene.

[steve hyde]

...It's an interesting idea, but not clear what kind of feedback you are after (??)

Steve

[audadvnc]

'Can you have a documentary in which all the characters are actors and the whole story is false'?

Sure. Watch CNN any day of the week. How about that "North Korea Undercover" one? Or any White House "press conference" with fake journalists paid to provide softball questions?

A little more down the way you're talking, how about any Larry Clark docupotboiler such as Kids?

[Evan Kubota]

Larry Clark is (was?) great. I haven't seen 'Wassup Rockers' yet.