Jo Gaffney is saving movies.
The 24-year-old Vancouver director is to premiere their new short THE LAST DIY SHOW at Fantasia International Film Festival in...35 minutes, as I type this. Shot on 16mm, the punk rock zombie comedy exemplifies the scrappy, go-for-broke, collaborative attitude that acts as a salve to an era increasingly plagued with AI slop.
It's not anti-AI, per say. Gaffney's not wagging their finger at a tech bro crowd. Their argument's made in the smorgasbord of art laying around THE LAST DIY SHOW's set, repurposed from that of a local punk venue. I'm talking homemade posters, flyers, fake merch. A cross-section showcasing the inside of someone's body sees organs bedazzled in sparkles via stop-motion animation in order to reveal what happens to the human body when it goes full zombie. Each frame of 16mm film is revealed with tatters intact, hinting at the frame preceding it, just out of sight.
The medium is the message: analog is not only king, but also vital to human expression. There's joy to discover through paint-stained fingers and cardboard props, foley sessions made of squashed fruit, nights spent alongside friends and partners, packed like sardines at a parent's house. The textures, the imperfections stick to the brain like graffiti to a wall, lipstick to a mirror. And these tokens of well-spent time survive, long beyond what a human body can hold.
Movies are tokens of experience, communicating the desires and troubles we struggle to put to words. To leave these feelings to mere prompts is ephemeral and misses the point. Instead, try shooting 3,000 feet of film over four days to tell a story about a punk-rock breakup while surviving the first hour of the zombie apocalypse. I think you'll have more fun and, much like Jo Gaffney, you'll be saving movies too.
THE LAST DIY SHOW is playing as part of Fantasia's Perilous Ports program July 21st at 6:35pm EST (lol right now). More info can be found here.
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