PARADISE

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Selected examples of a New Cinema

Michael Almereyda's most recent film, Paradise, is an astonishingly beautiful and poignant sketchbook, a collection of fragmentary episodes captured during ten years of travels. It is a gathering up of intimately shared moments with friends and strangers, rendered with a sense of mystery, wonderment, and sly humor.
The film started as a video diary, a way of holding onto experiences - images of people and places. It was haphazard as a photo album, random as memory. But in stitching episodes together I began to recognize and build a structure. (Four symmetrical sections, separated by fades to black.) The film became less a self-portrait and more of a panoramic group portrait of children and their adult counterparts. A description of the world we inherit, grow into, fumble around in. The film's fragmentary nature is held in check by thematic contrasts and links, and by the overarching idea that life is made up of brief paradisiacal moments - moments routinely taken for granted, and always slipping away. (Michael Almereyda)