I AM : )
A journey that takes us back and forth between the borders of the world wide web and the tangible world. Narrated by the voices of a young generation of Internet users- sharing, liking, posting, viewing, chatting. ¨I am :)¨ meditates on the realities of isolation and the need of interaction, of expressing your most inner thoughts through a web cam and of the voyeuristic obsession that social media have awakened in all of us. On one side the need of sharing our videos, pictures, stories on the Internet – looking for ways to express ourselves, to communicate and to interact. On the other side the curiosity for other people’s lives which creates an audience and complements the necessary elements that allows this world to exist.
NOTES
(2019)
There’s an increasing number of youth chasing the “dream” job career of becoming Social Media star, influencers with hundreds of thousands followers, earning “easy” money from the advertising and the product placement on their YouTube and Instagram channels.
What scares me the most is how quickly private companies, through the humongous collection of our data, succeeded in using our vulnerabilities and social needs to turn us into commodities and cheap retailers of their and other companies products. They lured youth (and not only) into craving this digital attention, social acceptance, digital status and told them they could make a “job” out of it, that we could turn ourselves into brands and fulfil ourselves.
More than 7 years ago I made this film with YouTubers videos with less than 10 views. Some of the videos had only one view: mine. I watched hours and hours of footage and I was shocked and moved to find such intimately personal confessions made to a web cam.
Back then I thought the internet was just making us lonely, alienating us from each other but at the same time giving us a space to express that, giving us the illusion of being heard. Their message resonated with me and how I felt about a life giving out more and more to the online. I thought I had been lucky that internet, social medias and smartphones weren’t there when I was too young to be critical about it.
Now, only 7 years later, I see how this “loneliness” has been turned into a successful profit making model where we are persuaded to chase likes, views, hearts, stars, followers, while we gift multinationals with our most personal information and help them make money out of it, increasing their power and influence over our crumbling societies.
CREDITS
DIRECTOR Giorgio Bosisio
PRODUCTION COMPANY London Film School
PRODUCER Gabriel Stavenhagen
DOPÂ Alex Grigoras
CAMERA OPERATORÂ Ben Mitchell
EDITOR Iason Arvanitakis
MUSIC Glynn Bolter
TECH SPECS
>SHORT DOC<
PRODUCTION YEAR 2012
COUNTRY UK
RUNNING TIME 9m41s
SHOOTING FORMAT 16mm
LANGUAGE English
FESTIVALS
Guanjuato International Film Festival, 2013 – Seleciòn Oficial Corto Documental
Mecal – Festival Internacional de Cortometrajes y Animaciòn de Barcelona