The Reinvention of Normal
2015 · 7m · United Kingdom
Directed by Liam Saint-Pierre
Genres: biography, documentary
A playful profile of artist, inventor and designer Dominic Wilcox, who turns the mundane and ordinary into surprising, wondrous and quietly thought-provoking creations. Following his father's advice to "go straight off the wall," Wilcox chases a relentless stream of absurd-but-ingenious ideas.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a doc that doesn't feel like a doc—more like watching someone's fever dream get projected onto a screen—but the whimsy threatens to calcify into a predictable artist-profile pretty fast, which is exactly the kind of safe subversion that bores me.
Saint-Pierre situates this squarely in the lineage of essayistic portraiture (think Errol Morris meets graphic autobiography), and the integration of Wilcox's own hand-drawn elements reads as a formal choice rather than a gimmick—rigorous in its commitment to form following subject.
The decision to let Wilcox's own drawings animate the narration is the whole film—it collapses the distance between subject and medium so completely that you're not watching a profile anymore, you're inhabiting his creative logic, and on a 7-minute budget that's the kind of singular choice that transforms everything.
Reviews
A quirky, playful look into the mind of a man who looks at the world just a wee bit differently than everyone else — 7 minutes of unadulterated joy in the visual form.
Festivals
- Berlin Short Film Festival 2015, Best Documentary
- New York Short Film Festival 2015, Best Documentary
- Sunderland Shorts Film Festival 2015, Best Documentary
- Leeds International Film Festival 2015, Audience Award