A few months ago, while talking about Star Wars: The Force Awakens on a podcast, I came up with a general theory for how we experience a lot of movies — especially sci-fi. These days, there is less and less room for discovery. We’ll never again be able to discover a universe like Star Wars. It exists and that magic of discovery, reserved for those who saw it in theaters in the late 1970s, is gone. What we’re doing now is exploring. We do this with Star Wars, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, DC’s upcoming cinematic universe. We’ll do it with the upcoming sequels to Prometheus and Blade Runner. We’re not discovering these worlds, we’re exploring them further.
Which is why it’s refreshing when we can discover something new, even if it clearly has some roots in existing material. The world itself, if the project is well-done, is new. That’s what draws me to Monday morning emails about French sci-fi movies with strange names and even stranger teasers. Which is what’s led me to writing about Ickerman, the first feature film by Raphaël Hernandez and Savitri Joly-Gonfard, a director duo working together under the pseudonym Seth Ickerman. They gained attention a few years ago with their 55-minutes fan film Kaydara, inspired by the Matrix universe.
“Taking place in a futuristic megalopolis where new technologies and virtual reality are ruling society, Ickerman follows the adventures of a nostalgic high school teacher obsessed with 35 mm films and old cars. As he tries to rescue his best friend from the guru of this digital era, he falls into his imaginary world, acting like the characters he admires, and gives back to this world a part of reality…”
Clearly these filmmakers have seen movies like The Matrix and Blade Runner, but these visuals are interesting. The teaser is a single sequence — a car chase — but the designs of the vehicles and the cityscape show some potential. See for yourself below.
The film is still gathering financing and polishing its script. The official press release states that the directors are currently looking for an English-speaking screenwriter to do a pass on their script, as they intend to make the film in English. This teaser was made with “no budget,” which makes it even more impressive. If all goes well, they will be shooting the film in early 2017.
There are always a number of variables with a project like this. Can they get the script right and deliver a compelling story? Can they keep the quality of the visuals up for an entire feature film on what will undoubtedly be a limited budget? Based on the press release they provided with the teaser, it appears as if this teaser is serving as a demo reel of sorts: “the goal is to follow the business model of Leviathan and Sundays whose teasers were recently optioned by US studios (Fox for Leviathan, Warner Bros for Sundays).”
It’s interesting to read something like that directly from a group of international filmmakers. We would normally look down upon the notion of Hollywood swooping in to pick up the rights to a cool concept, only to remake it immediately. With Ickerman, that appears to be the goal. And who knows, it may work. Without knowing any more about the project, I’d like to see the duo known as Seth Ickerman follow through with their own low-budget feature. That will probably be better than the eventual American remake, anyway.
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