Kickstarter

full-length clip from Congress:
http://vimeo.com/10618166

The Great Day of His Wrath by John Martin

Congress: A Thousand Years of Death is the dark history of an American town told through a series of cinematic portraits of the people who died there. The screenplay is a mosaic of fictional obituaries and together they construct and unlock a mystery about the ultimate fate of Congress and its people. The obituaries will be filmed as vignettes set to an original score by such contemporary musical artists as Grouper, Mount Eerie, Ô PAON, and Andrew Dorsett.

Congress is a cinematic tone piece, a dirge for the dead. But hidden in the text is a larger narrative about a mysterious history. Influenced by such films as Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Shining, it bangs a tuning fork against the bones of a ghost town to find a secret history in its rhythms. The seemingly disparate vignettes build to a crescendo; each tale reveals insights, secrets, prophecies, mysteries and revelations about the town. Congress at its core is a Gothic mystery about the birth, evolution and death of a place.

If you want to see Congress and grant us the PRIVILEGE to make this film then we will go into full-blown production this September. We plan to shoot for 3 weeks on location in a coastal ghost town in Northern California. Our kickstarter goal is $13,000. This is the absolute minimum amount we need to make our film, the cast and crew will be working for no money, every penny will be represented in the film's production value. The musicians will be scoring the film this winter. Sometime early next year the soundtrack will be released on both CD and vinyl. The soundtrack LP will be limited to 1,000 copies and anyone who donates $75 or more will receive a copy. This release will also include a companion book of art and photography from the film.

A few weeks ago, I went out with Congress' DP and shot the sequence featured above on the Canon 7D as a test to establish the atmosphere and scale of our film. We completed the sequence for a couple hundred dollars, and after we looked at our finished test we were positive that we can make the feature on a very small budget.

Thank you so much for reading about this project! And one more thing. Please, please, please contact me if you want to work on the film. It would mean just as much as a monetary donation if you donated your physical self to the production.