Four years, Four Seasons, One Movie

With summer unofficially over, it’s time for fall, hands down the best season of the year. Fall means Halloween, and that means movies that bend the mind, trick the senses and raise goosebumps on the skin.
Toronto-based band Paint have teamed up with Stratasfear Productions for a new experimental sci-fi film, 11:11, which will have its theatrical debut on Friday, Sept. 11, at the Royal Cinema on College Street.


This is the latest installment in Paint’s “Cinematic Universe” series and tells a story across four seasons and four years, based on four interconnected songs from the band’s new release, Based on Truth and Lies. The short film, starring Zac Che as Trevor and Victoria Urquhart as Taylor, “follows Trevor’s journey into oblivion through the colliding of multiple layers of consciousness and reality—where nothing is as it seems, or eve as it is: a multi-layered look at our most basic needs gone awry,” according to an announcement about the Sept. 11 screening.
R. Stephenson Price, director of The Indie Machine and Boomerang, a previous Paint project, directed this film as well, with its $6,000 budget funded in part by an IndieGoGo campaign with contributions from FACTOR Canada. Each scene of the screenplay was used as a framework for the film, Price says, “really digging into each one to find what was buried beneath the surface narrative as we continued to add new elements into the fold throughout production. Obviously this might be the reason why the project inflated to five times the original project size, but we like to think that the film needed—or wanted?—to become what it ultimately did.”

11:11 began as an experiment in creating a minimalist black-and-white visual accompaniment to four Paint songs as we ventured into the uncharted territory of doing an EP instead of an LP,” explains Paint singer and producer Rob Johannes. He points to Anton Corbijn’s work with U2’s No Line on the Horizon as an influence, using the film Linear as a trailer to the album. “11:11 [initially] took its cue from Linear to be a 16-minute real-time set of moving pictures to accompany Paint’s Based on Truth and Lies EP.”
In the end, the film takes “what was seemingly a simple story of an illicit relationship-turned-marriage gone wrong” and “became something significantly more grand and altogether creepy, unsettling and touching.”

There will be a Q&A session with the cast and crew following the premiere. More information is available on Paint’s website. Admission is $5, or free with TIFF passes. The band also will be playing at the Horseshoe tavern on Sept. 9.

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