Direction: Aaron Dylan Kearns, Juli Maria Kearns
Screenplay: Juli Maria Kearns, Aaron Dylan Kearns
Concept: Aaron Dylan Kearns, Juli Maria Kearns, Steven Cline, Hazel Cline
Cast: Aaron Dylan Kearns (The Tenant), Tommy Ward (The Neighbor), Tom Leary (Mover), Keaton Stewart (Mover), Ben Holst (Radio Announcer)
Director of Cinematography: Aaron Dylan Kearns
Cameras: Aaron Dylan Kearns, Steven Cline, Hazel Cline, Juli Maria Kearns
Crew: Steven Cline, Hazel Cline, Martin E. Kearns
Costuming: Aaron Dylan Kearns
Art Direction: Aaron Dylan Kearns
Editing: Aaron Dylan Kearns
Production assistant: Martin Kearns
Sound Design: Aaron Dylan Kearns
Soundtrack: Aaron Dylan Kearns (Compositions, percussion, mixing), Steven Cline (Surrealist percussion, zither, empty bottle harmonics), Hazel Cline (Surrealist percussion, zither, empty bottle harmonics), Martin E. Kearns (Electric guitar, engineering)
Special Thanks to: Martin E. Kearns
Genre: Absurdist crisis comedy, Avant-garde, experimental, panic realism
Runtime: 18:55
Budget: $300
Completion Date: November 10, 2019
Box Men is about two men who live next door to one another spiral into paranoia when they find a box in their apartment.
Box Men was made as a part of the 2019 Buried Alive Film Festival Sinema Challenge, a 13-day filmmaking challenge where a makeshift crew is tasked with creating a short in 13 days. It was my first time ever leading a team for an event like this, my second time directing actors. I was made aware of the challenge previously with my involvement in other teams’ shorts for the Sinema Challenge. I had an interest in leading my own team for several years, ever since I conceived a campy comedic horror short titled Boogeyman Meets The Spooky Teens Out By Blood Creek from the prompts given for a team I was working for in 2017. I wanted to lead my own team to make something very campy, stylized, somewhat 60s B-movie-esque in the randomness the film would embody from the prompts that were given. This year though, my intention in joining was from a more distinctly surrealist Bataille inspired standpoint in creating a sort of media hijacking, the context of seeing the film in the challenge’s lineup itself being a surreal experience for the audience.
The prompts we drew for our film were “Madness and Paranoia” and “Terrorists”. Being that the last film I made just before this was Kafka’s Supermarket, it was no doubt that we really lucked out on the draw.
In the span of just 12 days, our team conceived, wrote and filmed a nearly 20 minute short completely from the ground up. The only catch is that the maximum running time for a short in the challenge is actually 8 minutes. While the version of Box Men we ended up creating was the shortened version of a much longer concept, the film still maxed out with its length over the limit for what could be accepted. For this reason, I can now release the film early, showing its complete state the day it was to be submitted for consideration.
The team name we ended up selecting was titled after the Acéphale secret society that was partly curated by Georges Bataille. Special thanks go to everyone who generously participated in the making of the film: Steven Cline, Hazel Cline, Tommy Ward, Keaton Stewart, Tom Leary, Ben Holst, Juli Kearns, and Martin Kearns.
The Trailer
Preview Clips:
The delivery.
Bugs.
You Get All the Great Sunsets.
Box Men poster:
