'Shapes' is NOT another sycophant critic to the world at the time of Social Media. We believe in a cinema that rises from irrational spasms and that satisfy the human need to communicate the Incommunicable. We are not only interested in telling you a story. We intend to evoke atmospheres and irrational sensations within the mise-en-scene.

'Shapes' is Cinema of the Absurd.
Four young adults - Reuben, Marnie, James and Adam - share a flat but they are completely unable to communicate with each other. Days pass by, the outside world is filtered by YouTube videos, war news, horoscopes and reality shows.
When Marnie starts getting more nervous because her visa will soon expire and will have to leave the country, Reuben understands the tensions arising in the flat and decides to try to establish a dialogue with his flatmates. As they spend nights together, have parties and try to hang out, their relational problems come out, pushing them to change and find a meaning to their lives.

Every film has its own story; this is ours:   



It's 2013. Oleg Micheyev is a successful photographer. During the last 20 years he has been awarded several times as 'Photographer of the Year' and praised by Fuji, Kodak and plenty of magazines. Besides his success, he has always despised money and made sure to throw it away as soon as he had some.
A day like any other, he wakes up in his London council flat and he is suddenly tired of his work, he can't find stimuli anymore. From that moment on, he starts rejecting every single job offer and stops teaching at UAL.


During a period of confusion and starvation, Oleg randomly ends up at a screening of short-films at the legendary Prince Charles Cinema in Leicester Square. One of the films attracts his attention. It is 'After the Shipwreck' by the Italian filmmaker Roberto Prestia.

After the screening, Oleg felt displaced and did not really know what to think about it. He took a few days to realize he was actually enthusiastic, he defined it 'absurd' and 'special'. Soon he contacted Roberto Prestia and proposed to make a film together.


At that time, Roberto had just finished to showcase his latest film around festivals and was now spending all of his days shut in his room in Brixton. He was considering becoming a monk, while on his rare social appearances, he used to embarrass his friends by wearing a black tunic and repeatedly stating that the end of the world had long past for Western Society.

When he first met Oleg, he thought he was mad and felt slightly scared by his frantic way of speaking. He took three weeks to understand that their meeting had actually happened for real and it was not only a projection of his mind.

Nine months later they were on set together, shooting the teaser for 'Shapes'.

Roberto has always had a precise way of working: he amasses loads of experiences and feelings until the day he needs to throw them up. He likes to say that every film is an exorcism.
Through this process, our goal is to explore a feeling of 'social impotence' and the irrational nostalgia which starts to arise in the characters throughout the film:

• These characters are real misfits. They were born before the Digital Revolution had changed human interactions. So they feel misplaced and unable to communicate with each other.
  
  
• They live in an undefined world capital. It could be anywhere, as any form of cultural identity has been absorbed by the Globalization Empire.
  
  
• The entire film is set inside their flat, which is built in a 'nowhere space'. Only objects and human presence can define their location. It is poetics of the virtual where the perception of space and time has been completely violated.
  
  
• Everyday web magazines deliver war news from all around the world, but the more they do, the more they kill the facts, depriving them of any sense of reality, reducing them to vulgar banalities.
  
  
• When someone tries to listen to a love song on YouTube, he first has to go through an advert about rechargeable batteries, which completely kills the Romantic atmosphere he was trying to set for himself. Romance is dead.
  

Always critical of the modern world, Reuben declares that TV Series are immoral. While he tries to write a play against YouTubers, he is tormented by Job Centre letters menacing him to cut his benefits.

Marnie hates her job, hates her customers and hates the 'Hipster human kind'. Actually she seems to hate everything around her. She is Reuben's girlfriend, but they barely speak to each other.

Tired of his constant financial struggle, Adam has long ago given up his artistic dreams. Now he sells car accessories online and spends his free time listening to Radio-Horoscopes, while looking for the love of his life on dating websites.

James understands that his flatmates don't respect his work as YouTuber, but he really believes in his talent and dreams of the day when he will be worldwide famous. Even though he has serious problems in approaching women, he is now preparing a series of videos about dating girls.

Roberto Prestia
Director & Writer
Coming from the hot and insane Palermo, Roberto was only five years old when he started to write his first screenplays. At the age of seven, he bought his first camera, a Sony handy-cam. Inspired by Philip K. Dick's novels, he shot plenty of short-films and two amateur feature films, using his classmates as actors.

In 2010 he started a BA course in Media Practice at the London College of Communication, where he had the chance to direct three short-films.
After graduating, Roberto has worked in plenty of productions as editor, director and has written scripts on commission.
His most recent works have been screened across the world in film festivals such as Raindance Film Festival and Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival.

Oleg Micheyev

Director of Photography
FUJI Fashion Photographer of the Year in 2002, he is a London based photographer.
Since 1990 Oleg has worked consistently as a freelancer, predominantly for music and fashion clients, and as fine art photographer, selling his work regularly to art dealers and appearing in exhibitions. For several years he has worked as lecturer for the University of the Arts London.
Tate Britain has recently obtained a collection containing 13 of his photos. His clients include BBC, Fuji Film Ltd., Playboy, Vogue, GQ, Red Bull and many others.

  

Alessio Gambaro
Producer
Alessio Gambaro was born in Genoa in 1980. He earned a New York University diploma in film production in 2002.
His first short movies (The little match girl, La città dei morti, Esterno piazza,notte) were selected and awarded multiple times within the Italian festivals circuit.
In 2010 he wrote and co-directed his first self-produced feature film Il caso Krolevsky (The Krolevsky Case, based on the theatrical drama Biografie. Ein spiel by Max Frisch). After drawing some nominations and honorable mentions in several international festivals, the film gained a special critical attention in Italy through a collection of critiques written by various authors and published by the renowned publishing house Falsopiano. At the moment he is developing the screenplay of his second fiction movie with the support from the programme “Media” of the European Union.

If you are wondering how the hell are we going to shoot this film with such a low budget, here is the answer!
Luckily enough, we have free unlimited access to the studio where we will be shooting the film and we own our own camera and sound equipment. This gives us the chance to keep our budget pretty low, but we all know that filmmaking isn't the cheapest thing on this planet and we still need to cover fees for cast and crew, location expenses, and naturally post-production and basic distribution (such as film premiere and festivals submissions).
£20.000 is our minimum budget and this graph shows briefly how it will be divided amongst the different departments.

What if we don't hit our target?

We are resolute in our intentions. We want to make this film at any cost because we understand that this is the only way to do it. If you really believe in your project, you must accept the fact that whatever can go wrong, will go wrong and this film will be made only if 'at the end of the match' you will still be standing. It's like a sport.
We like to quote Werner Herzog when he says "If you want to do a film, steal a camera, steal raw stock, sneak into a lab and do it!".

More practically, this means that we will use whatever we raise to go on set and shoot the film. Meanwhile we will be hunting other sources to complete post-production and distribution. So any amount we will manage to raise will certainly make a great difference.