Esperanto Film Wins Best Satire Short at the NYII FVF in Los Angeles

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(Free-Press-Release.com) November 30, 2008 -- FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
of interest to editors and journalists covering: film reviews, art, social trends, work life, women’s issues, lifestyle, psychology, mental health, Esperanto, sociology, poetry

December 1, 2008
Joan Bechtel
SocioPathways
55 Pacifica Ave. #21, Bay Point, CA 94565 925 300-5842
email: joanbechtel1@comcast.net www.SocioPathways.com
to view trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Ne+Plu+Pikniko&search_type=&aq=f

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Esperanto Film Wins Best Satire Short at the NYII FVF in Los Angeles

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Esperanto Film wins Best Satire Short at the New York International Independent Film and Video Festival in Los Angeles

Ne Plu Pikniko Lampoons Corporate Culture

Dreamy black and white surrealism. Heady, angst filled self-examination. Moody shots of oppressive cityscapes. Is it a censored masterpiece just released for public viewing? A lost avant-garde film from Eastern Europe? A Luis Bunuel home movie? No, it’s an award-winning satirical short by Bay Area filmmaker and author, Joan Bechtel, screening at the Laemmle Sunset 5 in Hollywood December 8th at the New York International Independent Film and Video Festival’s Los Angeles venue.

The 25-minute art film in black and white and Esperanto follows one woman’s descent into the Corporate Inferno of San Francisco’s Financial District. In a comic labyrinth of existential agony an angst-ridden office temp suffers mythological torment, searches for meaning, and waits for the five o’clock release. Ne Plu Pikniko (meaning No More Picnic in Esperanto) is a comic odyssey into the alienation of the workplace, an elegy for a lost past of community, an exploration of psychological and cultural dissociation, and a social satire lampooning corporate deification.

Winner of Best Satire Short at the 2008 festival, Ne Plu Pikniko also won Second Prize awards at both the San Francisco Poetry Film Festival and the Rutgers Mixed Media Festival almost twenty years ago. Reviewers have called the film “redolent of Euripides,” “like Woody Allen interpreting Sartre,” and “the film that got the greatest audience response.” Drive-in critic, Joe Bob Briggs, called it “perhaps the mother of all art films.”

Alienation, angst and Esperanto. Not a new drink invented by a disgruntled barista, it’s the recipe for a wild ride on the roller coaster of existential anguish. A somewhat autobiographical film, Bechtel admits her years of temping in San Francisco’s soaring “carnal chambers of commerce” became the motivation for the project. She and her nephew, Chris Orpheus, conspired to shoot the film guerrilla style at various locations in San Francisco’s financial district. The film’s gritty black and white foreign look suggests a lost experiment of the 60’s, a mirror of the film’s actual odd genesis. Bechtel explains, “After a nervous breakdown, I became a single mother and never had the resources to take the film to the next level. But now the NYIIFVF, ITN distributors and IndieFlix.com are changing that.”

So if Esperanto is not the main ingredient in an iced mocha with a triple shot and flat soy milk, what is it? “It is a language that is both everyone’s and no one’s,” says former stand-up comic, Bechtel. “It is a man-made language invented by L.L. Zamenhoff in 1887 (Basia sings about it) to eliminate language barriers in order to promote peace.”

“Esperanto has no ancient past,” Bechtel continues. “It is nobody’s mother tongue. Nobody remembers the Old World of Esperanto except the character in this film. It is the language of pure alienation in one sense. And the ultimate language of connection in another. There is innocence about it, too. It is completely non-nationalistic. Based on Latin, though incredibly simplified, it has that very emotional sound. I wanted to intertwine that warm pathos with the cooler more intellectual English subtitles, and contrast both of these with the mundane yet surreal images. At one point, as she is riding the commuter train across the “River Styx,” the main character in the film declares she is ‘a maggot squirming in the bone pile.’ I think we’ve all felt that way at work.” Bechtel recalls a woman who quit her job upon seeing the film. “I really felt successful in that moment. Connected, inspired, that my work had meaning.”

Bay Area filmmaker, Joan Bechtel, will be exhibiting her award-winning short film, Ne Plu Pikniko (No More Picnic), at the Laemmle Sunset 5 Theatre in Hollywood December 8th at 10 PM. It will screen at Cannes in the Spring of 2009.

More information can be found online at http://www.sociopathways.org

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