If you’ve passed the stairwell at the bottom of 4th Ave NE leading down from NE 40th to NE 40th* over the past few weeks, you may have noticed a film crew at work. Perhaps you wondered what they were filming.
We were, too, so we asked: it’s an independent film, Ulysses 2.0, being produced by the Citizen Lebowski Project, a “a cinema-based laboratory for citizen-artists” associated with Cornish School for the Arts:
For better or for worse, one of the most visible remnants of the classical epic tradition is the reality-based competition show (MTV Road Rules, Survivor, Rock of Love, etc.). Ulysses 2.0takes this trashiest of popular genres as a “found object” (and as a means of staging the experiences of a group of students who are themselves exploring the relevance of epic storytelling).
Alex, an unemployed construction worker and a struggling design student, appears to catch a break when his class is taken over by the “History 2.0” show, a sketchy web-based reality series in which students compete for tuition money by concocting creative documentaries about historical events. Alex’s team proposes a video exploring the civil rights movement through the eyes of Coretta Scott King (the wife of MLK)–but when the “Coretta” concept begins to flounder, a desperate Alex conspires to profit from the project’s demise.
Watch for it on a screen near you!
* Yes, it’s a bit odd, but NE 40th splits into two at Latona and, while both the upper and lower sections are two-way, they both retain title to 40th.