Covering Media

Peter Scanavino as Jack in ZENITH, a film by Vladan Nikolic. Picture courtesy Cinema Purgatorio. All rights reserved.

Zenith (2010/2011)

Opened: 01/19/2011 Limited

Trailer: Click for trailer

Websites: Home, Facebook

Genre: Sci-Fi/Thriller

Rated: Unrated

Short Synopsis

ZENITH is a retro-futuristic steam-punk thriller, about two men in two time periods, whose search for the same grand conspiracy leads them to question their own humanity.

Starting from a fictional recreation of Stanley Milgram's Obedience to Authority experiment (see more on the experiment in Background and Influences), ZENITH plunges into following two parallel stories - of father and son - now, and 40 years into the future. Searching for the same elusive conspiracy, both father and son find no answers; instead, their journeys unravel their lives and force them to look deep and hard at themselves and their surroundings. In the end, they are both confronted with the same Faustian bargain - but each one chooses a very different path.

Long Synopsis

Forty years from now, in a desolate and indefinite post-industrial future, the population has been genetically altered to live in a constant state of happiness. But what they soon discover is that without contrasting it to sorrow, happiness dissipates, leaving only a feeling of never-ending numbness. Only pain can now make people feel alive. Added to the backdrop of this biological nightmare, this new world has been robbed of its language, and in its place is a bland, simplistic type of speech: "For" as one character puts it "what you cannot express in language, does not exist in human minds."

Enter Jack, a young man and former doctor, who has been disillusioned by this blighted world and has abandoned his profession. Now he is a peddler of substances that induce pain -- a pain- dealer. Jack has his own medical condition: he suffers from complex-partial seizures, a rare form of epilepsy, which often makes his life intolerable, but has the strange power to enable him to understand words that no one else can understand any more. Hiding this secret from the world, Jack goes by the name "Dumb Jack," selling drugs and living a sordid life, surviving in this bleak underground world of the "pain trade."

But one day something happens that changes everything. A strange man shows up at Jack's door and hands him a single videotape that Jack's long-lost father, Ed Alexander Crowley, left behind. It is the first in a series of 10 tapes in which Ed has documented his life and his pursuit of what he calls the "Grand Conspiracy," a conspiracy that quite possibly could be the answer to what happened to Jack's world.

Inspired by his father's tape, Jack sets out on his own investigation. But in order to solve the whole puzzle, he must locate the remaining nine tapes. Jack begins to track down more tapes, but the larger answer--the larger pattern--still eludes him.

As he ventures deeper into this mystery, the lines between Jack's interior and exterior world blur, leading him to question reality itself. But then he meets Lisa, a provocative but distant young woman. Wealthy, sexy, and outrageous, she is also as conflicted and lonely as Jack is. Through her, Jack encounters for the first time the possibility of real love. However, despite what he wants, Jack cannot stop the chain of events he has already set in motion.

Jack locates Ed's last tape, and what he discovers throws everything he thought he understood into chaos. Now Jack finds himself in a real-life nightmare, where he could lose everything, including Lisa. Through a series of climactic encounters, Jack realizes that his faith eerily resembles his father's. As he comes face-to-face with the proprietors of a world where greed and power threaten the basic concepts of our humanity, Jack must now decide how to save himself: Jack is faced with the same choice his father had to make forty years ago: to surrender his soul, or to remain true to himself, no matter the consequences.

Overview

ZENITH is a feature film. It is also a transmedia experience - a multi-platform media approach, where the film is the centerpiece, but the narrative and audience interaction can extend beyond watching the film by using the internet and new media applications.

Through a variety of websites, the experience participants (the audience members) are able to find, download and collect pieces of the narrative (the "tapes"), and re-construct them through active groups on social media sites (such as Facebook, Youtube, and others).

While they are able to re-create, interact and comment with the film's storyline this way, participants can also create and upload their own versions of the story, as ZENITH's narrative is open to multiple interpretations.

While the film stands on its own, the filmmakers' aim is also to explore new possibilities of storytelling through multiple forms of creation, interaction and distribution.