Conor Barry – producer – Life is Sacred / Brand New-U
FRED’s Matt Micucci interviews producer Conor Barry, who was at the 60th Cork Film Festival presenting two very different films – one is the documentary LIFE IS SACRED directed by Andreas Dalsgaard, and the other the science fiction film BRAND NEW-U by Simon Pummell. He talks to us about the two films, but also about the benefits of international co-production, especially for Ireland.
LIFE IS SACRED: A story about a fearless politician and his devoted followers. With an army of young people hoping for change, he uses mimes, pencils, flashmobs and superhero costumes to attack the corruption and violence in Colombia. A young woman falls in love with the movement, but to change a society penetrated by illegality, turns out to be much more difficult than she ever anticipated.
BRAND NEW-U: The organisation BRAND NEW-U identifies networks of Identicals – “people who walk like you, talk like you, but are walking through different, better lives” – and helps their customers make a life upgrade: eliminating the Better-Life donor, and relocating their client to that Brand New life. But errors can occur, and a Brand New life can cost more than expected. Brand New-U follows Slater as he is forced to move through a series of parallel lives. He becomes more and more obsessed as he tries to find the lover he lost, but what he must find in the end is himself. BRAND NEW-U takes elements of science-fiction movies and thrillers, strips them down, and re-mixes them into a looping dream-logic to create a contemporary allegory of our search for identity and human connection in our rootless, media-saturated worlds.