Sunday, May 24, 2015

LA Film Fest '15: Interview with '3rd Street Blackout'

I got the extreme pleasure of interviewing the filmmakers behind 3rd Street Blackout, Negin Farsad and Jeremy Redleaf. Their film was selected as one of the very few gems for Los Angeles Film Festival's Feature Narrative section and I loved it so much! Witty, charming, and thoroughly relevant in our technology inundated realm, 3rd Street Blackout is a knock-out. Read below!

Negin Farsad and Jeremy Redleaf, writers, directors and stars of 3rd Street Blackout, talked with Associate Programmer So Yun Um about their film, which also stars Janine Garofalo, John Hodgman and Ed Weeks. The story follows neuroscientist Mina and her hacker boyfriend Rudy, a picture-perfect, prototypical hipster couple who live, work and love across digital platforms. When Hurricane Sandy pummels the city and knocks out the power in their neighborhood, at first it is romantic. But when Rudy discovers an indiscretion that Mina kept secret, they must learn to navigate on analog terrain, or risk losing their relationship. 

Is this a story that happened in real life?

Negin: We were both in the hurricane zone after Hurricane Sandy. I was actually dating a guy and I had a relationship that was intensified because of the black out and I live on 3rd Street. And some of the characters [are based on real people]–like the chill master across the street is a real guy who’s played by Arthur French but the real chill master is a guy who appears in the film and says hello to the chill master. The guy at the card shop that I go to all the time plays the father of the actor who runs the card shop. There are real life people from the neighborhood. The band lives in my building and what not.

(read the rest of the interview at Film Independent)