Rhode Island International Film Festival 2009

A humorous (very) short film from the Motion Studies series depicting the furthest distance a man can run in a full suit of armor. Premiered at Sundance 2008.

A humorous short from the Motion Studies series proving the elasticity of time based on a study laundry cycles.

NEAR THE BEGINNING OF JAKE MAHAFFY’S B&W POSTAPOCALYPSE EPIC WAR, AN OFFSCREEN VOICE MURMURS, “This is the world after the end of the world.” The quote refers to the film’s camera trail of poverty and economic devastation, images suggesting a ruined American heartland as shot by Andrei Tarkovsky or Walker Evans. But the quote could just easily apply to Mahaffy’s own brand of independent filmmaking. Over the course of five years, Mahaffy shot War with a hand-cranked silent camera and without a crew. “I started off with a script and a very clear idea of what I wanted to do,” he explains. “But I didn’t have the money to shoot dialogue. So rather than stop I decided to shoot everything except the script. I shot hours and hours of the lives of the characters not in the script. I would just roll film and hope that it would come together in the end.” The result is a strange, ghostly depiction of lonely characters adrift in a rural wasteland set to a soundtrack of radio broadcasts and pensive narration. War played the Sundance Frontier section in 2004, and since then Mahaffy has continued to mine his singular style, returning to the festival this year with a short, Motion Studies #3: Gravity, part of a series of films “mocking the religion of science by artistically reinterpreting various scientific data.”

A trailer for the feature film War to be shown in Program II of the RIIFF Filmmaker Spotlight.

In the docurealist American tragedy Wellness, Willy Lomanesque salesman Thomas Lindsey gives everything he’s got—including his heart, soul, and money— to a financial scam that ends up bankrupting him and destroying his life. Falling under the spell of Paul Stubbs (played by the filmmaker’s own father), the charismatic bully behind the fake Wellness Corporation, Lindsey is lured in by a pyramid scheme that promises material, spiritual, and physical well-being in the form of a capsule. Despite his awkward persona and utter lack of experience, Lindsey (Jeff Clark, a psych-ward therapist by day) believes that he too can succeed at the miracle-cure business by spreading the word to other investors. Traveling to a small Pennsylvania town, he struggles to organize a sales presentation, awaiting the arrival of promotional materials that never materialize. Perversely, as the situation worsens, Lindsey’s resolve increases, until he finally steels himself for a leap of faith that can only mean disaster. In the end, he must choose between betraying other unwitting hopefuls or confronting the devastating loss of his life savings. Taking his own leap of faith with a projected budget of $2000, a handheld camera, and a two-week shooting schedule, director Jake Mahaffy and his nonprofessional cast improvised on location to flesh out his fictional premise, capitalizing on the naturalistic effects of such quasi-guerrilla techniques to highlight the tragic elements of the film. Wellness walks a tricky line between hope and denial with an unrelenting eye toward truth that can make viewers squirm with uneasy laughter even as they glean insight into the desperation on society’s fringes.