We Live in Public
The film We Live in Public has already won the 2009 Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury award. Director Ondi Timoner has made a 90-minute film that is about Josh Harris who is the pioneers of the Internet, and the documentary has been shot over a span of fifteen years.
Harris is considered as a great visionary in terms of seeing the future with so much clarity rather than his own life. Harris founded Pseudo.com in 1993 that originated Webcasting, YouTube, Hulu and other streamers, which made him dot.com millionaire in no time. Timoner has bagged the grand Jury award at Sundance Film festival for his film Digs, which portrays the future of a society that is greatly impacted by the recent technology boom.
Harris led a lonely childhood and displayed all the characteristics of a nerd who would constantly glued to the television and ‘Gilligan’s Island’ became his virtual friend.
Harris achieved the celebrity status quite soon in his dot.com career and his posh parties were targeted at the young techies very similar to him who had the potential to run the virtual world of Harris. By now Timoner had started covering Harris’ life.
The film We Live In Public starts off with ‘Goodbye Mom’ in which Harris is bidding a cyber farewell to his mother who was on the deathbed. It will rather be an underestimation to jut label the research done by the director as extensive; it is simply beyond one’s imagination as to how much of intense exploration has gone behind making this movie.
Timoner started covering the events of Harris’ life from the past fifteen years, which in itself is a great achievement. Timoner met Harris at the Pseudo.com’s first Internet television network and since then it has been no looking back.
Timoner followed Harris till the making of ‘Quiet’, which was documentation that included around Bohemians and Timoner was also a part of this experiment. These people had to under the constant gaze of surveillance cameras under the bunkers for a period of thirty days.
We Live in Public
Timoner was also present in a scene from We Live In Public in which Harris had fixed many cameras on himself and his girlfriend Tanya and they literally lived life in front of the public. And mind you that includes the use of restrooms too. So their entire life during these years was on the Internet, which is simply an unbelievable achievement.
The sad thing is Harris had a nervous breakdown after We live In Public, Which raises many questions and one such is; was the virtual life of Harris responsible for his state? And Harris Web experiment also collapsed.
But the film is an intense story about a visionary who was a lonely child away from his mother who was there by side only during happy moments and when she is dying he bids adieu to her over the Internet. What could have triggered him to do so that too when his mother was dying? Probably you will find the answers once you watch the film.
| Film | We Live in Public |
|---|---|
| Cast | Tom Harris |
| Director | Ondi Timoner |
| Writers | Ondi Timoner |
| Producers | Keirda Bahruth John Battsek Jeff Frey Meagan Keane Merritt Lear Vasco Nunes Edward Salzano Ondi Timoner Austin Wilkin |
| Runtime | 1 Hour 30 Minutes |
| Rating | 4/5 |
Posted on Sunday, October 25th, 2009 at 6:50 pm