About this project

It all started eight years ago when I moved to Los Angeles. I visited Downtown while searching for work. It was a long day and I enjoyed every bit of it. Eventually, I stopped for a sandwich at a sidewalk café, watching the passer-by, inhaling the unknowns of my new citadel.

The dusk arrived and made me a witness of an unprecedented metamorphosis.

Slowly, following the dimming of the day, the city was becoming an extremely different world. Shrieking sounds of heavy metal doors uniting with the sidewalk’s concrete, people rushing to desert the once overcrowded streets, and the appearance of erected tents where minutes ago was a 2 for 1 sale going on, gave me a sensation that, somehow I got lost in a refugee camp.
The city that was looming grandiosely ten minutes ago, is a war zone now.

No one seemed to notice or to care, I learned. This blatant anomaly seemed to be an undisputed part of the landscape, like an occasional cloud passing by in the forever foggy sky of this universally adulated city. No one pays attention to the celestial object and its mundane behavior. It just passes through the corner of their eyes, blurry, unworthy of a thought like so many other things.

I knew then that I have to capture somehow these two parallel worlds that exist one on top of the other without intersecting.

Parallel Settlements is a gritty documentary revealing the two extreme worlds of Los Angeles. One, shiny, scraping the skies, where limitless and greed is the only way; the other, laying inert at the base of sumptuousness, hopeless, blurred and unseen.

The documentary represents a crude reality, sometime in focus like the reality exists, sometime out of focus just like the way we do want to see the truth most of the time, unwilling to cope with the unpleasant.

Parallel Settlements is an essay for the conscious and unaware minds alike, a journey that once taken, one would have more questions and maybe, why not, plausible solutions.

Two and a half years ago I started a photo documentary of these parallel worlds but I realized that the moving pictures would be a more appropriate medium to reveal them. I wanted it to be a short film but it’s almost a feature length now.

So, here I am. I funded this project entirely by myself until now when my monetary resources have taken a leave of absence. The film is almost ready and it needs that extra oomph.
All the money raised will be used toward post-production (original music, sound mixing, music rights, editing, festival press packages, submission fees.)
Thank you for becoming a part of this project and for helping Parallel Settlements reach an audience.

Truly,
Jaia Papitz
http://www.iExile.com