Brand New U

by Simon Pummell

Brand New U

Synopsis

The organisation BRAND NEW-U identifies networks of Identicals - "people who walk like you, talk like you, but are walking through different, better lives" - and helps their customers make a life upgrade: eliminating the Better-Life donor, and relocating their client to that Brand New life. But errors can occur, and a Brand New life can cost more than expected.

BRAND NEW-U follows SLATER as he is forced to move through a series of parallel lives. He becomes more and more obsessed as he tries to find the lover he lost, but what he must find in the end is himself.

BRAND NEW-U takes elements of science-fiction movies and thrillers, strips them down, and re-mixes them into a looping dream-logic to create a contemporary allegory of our search for identity and human connection in our rootless, media-saturated worlds.

 

Director

Brand New-U is Simon Pummell's first narrative feature film. He is best known for directing the BAFTA-winning documentary feature film Bodysong (2003) that Time magazine described as "an utterly mesmerizing and humbling portrait of humanity." It was the first film to be scored by Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead and in 2010 was re-released as a British Film Institute Collectors Edition DVD & book.

Simon's recent feature documentary Shock Head Soul premiered in the Orizzonti Competition at the Venice Film Festival in 2011. The partner suite of animation films The Sputnik Effect showed as installations in galleries in Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Melbourne and M HKA Museum Ghent. The project forms a portrait of Daniel Paul Schreber the 19th Century outsider artist who elaborated a steam-punk vision of a machine universe penetrated by networks of ‘nerve-rays', with himself at the very centre as God's chosen bride.

Earlier in his career he made numerous award-winning animated films for UK television exploring various interpenetrations of technology and bodies. More recently an ongoing series of animation films Atlas For Animate Bodies showed as an installation at the Victoria & Albert Museum in Sept 2013.

In 2007/9 he was a Harvard University Film Study Center Fellow. Since 2010 he is Research Professor and Director of the Media Design Program at the Piet Zwart Institute for Graduate Research and Study.

He is currently developing two new feature-film screenplays with Hot Property Films: an adaptation of William Gibson's Dogfight and The Hitchcock Code.

 

Cast

Slater - Lachlan Nieboer
Nadia - Nora-Jane Noone
Joe - Nick Blood

Crew

Written & Directed by Simon Pummell
Produced by Janine Marmot
Co Produced by Conor Barry, John Keville, Reinier Selen
Executive Produced by Christopher Collins, Lizzie Francke, Rory Gilmartin, Keith Griffiths, Amy Gardner, Stephanie Bollag
Director Of Photography Reinier Van Brummelen
Edited by Tim Roza
Visual Effects Supervisor Barend Onneweer
Composer Roger Goula
Production Design by Greg Shaw
Costume Design by Suzanne Cave
Hair And Make-Up Design by Melanie Lenihan

Technical Data

Format: DCP / color
Length: 100 min.
Original language: English

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