The Project

Director:  Ryan Piotrowicz

 “Shoot First, Question Later.”

This Slamdance Audience Award winning faux documentary lets us watch through their own cameras young filmmakers Justin, his girlfriend Dana, and their friend John as they make a documentary on inner city life in Brooklyn. Justin follows the daily lives of two NYPD officers.  Dana and John follow Thomas, an African American teenager and good student, son, and big brother as he tries to navigate the pitfalls of inner city life including poverty, the bad influence of friends who have become drug dealers and thugs, and the return of an estranged father from prison destroying the fragile functionality of his home, in search of a better life.

The interesting thing that this film does is show how hard it must be for documentary film makers to involve themselves totally in the lives of a subject they grow to care about and yet still remain detached as they watch those subjects struggling with obstacles and bad choices. The temptation to help and not just observe must be overwhelming, and watching these filmmakers struggle with that is definitely engaging.

The first two thirds of the film worked really well in that it stuck to the fiction of filmmakers filming themselves during a documentary, so much so that despite the faces of a couple of recognizable actors in the film, some thought at first it was a real documentary.  However, about two thirds of the way through the film seemed to lose the anxious uncertainty that characterizes a real, gritty documentary and instead take off into melodrama.  Forced coincidences, two-dimensionalization of characters, and extreme, over the top, intense and violent situations that scream fictionalized all crop up stripping away the documentary feel that you were so connected to and turning it into a movie, and a very stereotypical one at that.  While there was a fair amount of good stuff here, I honestly would rather have seen the documentary it pretended to be.

Lucy Cruell