SPARROW SONGS LAUNCHES KICKSTARTER CAMPAIGN

By Scott Macaulay

I was happy to see Adam Daniel Mezei on his new PMD for Hire blog respond to the work of the Sparrow Songs team of Alex Jablonski and Michael Totten from this year’s “25 New Faces” list. Like me, he found something special in the tone and execution of these monthly short documentary pieces. (Check out Mezei’s post for detailed musings on five of the episodes.)

Now, Jablonski and Totten are launching a Kickstarter campaign to allow them to cover the expenses of the project and to shoot three particularly ambitious final episodes. Check out their work on their own site and please consider supporting them.

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SPARROW SONGS, GOD, KAROKE AND BANKSY

By Scott Macaulay

Sparrow Songs is a documentary project by filmmaker Alex Jablonski and d.p. Michael Totten, who are making and posting one short doc film per month on their site for a whole year. They are six episodes in, and the films are quite wonderful. Averaging about eight minutes, they are poetic essays that capture the essences of specific places, people, and moments, and that then, without pretension, build these observances into larger statements about love, truth, community, and the ways we are choosing to live our lives.

The films include Porn Star Karoke, about the crowd that gathers weekly at an L.A. club for an evening of karoke with adult movie stars. In Donut Shop, the filmmakers insert themselves into their film as they wonder why more people won’t talk to them during a night spent at a 24-hour donut joint. In the most recent, L’Arche, the filmmakers visit a home for the developmentally disabled in which the residents are cared for in a warm, non-institutional environment; they focus not only on the residents but also on the caregivers, who include a young woman who has just left a monastery. With their artful framings, precise editing, and sensitive use of sound and music, Jablonski and Totten capture the quest of everyone at L’Arche to find purer, less complicated ways of living.

Sparrow Songs is a beguiling project that gains its power by the commitment shown to it by its filmmakers. Their web page contains thumbnails of the six episodes finished so far and blank spots for the six that are yet to come. The knowledge that these are not just disparate short films but rather installments in time-based project give Sparrow Songs a quiet gravity. Watching these films, you find yourself drawing connections between them. You watch — and wait — for themes to develop, and you project onto the filmmakers an evolving recognition of their authorship. It is slow-motion filmmaking dispensed in short, elegantly realized segments.

After watching L’Arche, which I’ve embedded below, I visited the Sparow Songs site, signed up for the newsletter, and … Read the rest