A joint program of screenings by Garage Screen and The Blueprint, an independent online publication covering fashion, beauty, and contemporary culture.
We have never looked forward to tomorrow with such impatience and vigilance as during the first half of 2020. For a long time, dreams about the future were the prerogative of writers, forecasts were left to scientists, marketers, and economists, and alternative approaches to global human issues—from the fear of loneliness to overpopulation—were mainly developed by artists, essayists, and philosophers. In just a few months, the pandemic has brought many of us closer to the point at which inner anxiety requires more nuanced measures than a favorite melodrama and compulsive shopping before sleep. No longer able to suppress their fears, many people felt the need to verbalize them somehow.
This year’s Garage Screen summer program with The Blueprint features a number of very different films based around the same emotion—the endless internal anxiety which the protagonists attempt to resolve in some way. Constructing escapist illusions or dystopian scenarios, in an abstract future or an alternative present, invoking deep sadness or joyful empathy in the viewer, each of these films questions more than it answers, while also establishing on the screen, each in its own unique way, a fragile system of credence in the new world, incomprehensible and unfamiliar. They are all films about the near future, that which will be built tomorrow based on the answers to the unusual questions we ask ourselves today.
Screenings will take place every other Tuesday at Garage Screen summer cinema.