David Lindsay-Wright

THE ELEVEN TOMORROWS & F3

- Futures Film Festival conceived by David Lindsay-Wright (PhD)

TITLE: The Eleven Tomorrows FORMAT: Collaborative portmanteau flash fictions feature film (90 minutes) GENRE: a place-based futures film PRODUCTION: Brisbane Movie Makers + TExT-TUBE FUTURES STUDIOS EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS: David Lindsay-Wright & Peter Waterman (President, BMM) SCREENPLAY: 11 stories, 11 writers/directors

LAUNCH: March 1, 2022 – World Future Day TITLE: f3 - futures film festival at the Elizabeth Street Five-Star Cinema. LAUNCH: March 1, 2023 – World Future Day

THE Eleven Tomorrows, which will official launch on World Future Day, March 1, 2022, emerged from my personal frustration while writing the scripts for multiple futures flash fictions and finding myself not being able to travel to shoot the multi-location screenplays. This eventually led me to the decision to shoot from where I was, Brisbane Australia. I filtered out what I considered the best of my 100+ futures fictions and decided to adapt them to my Brisbane base, making this city the storyworld for the 11 selected futures stories. It was at this point that I became a member of an intriguing group of filmmakers – Brisbane Movie Makers – and made a further decision suggesting to make The Eleven Tomorrows a collaboration with 11 members of the BMM as a portmanteau film featuring 11 writers-directors, 11 ‘takes’ on the futures of this emerging world city.

The film will explore how different locations and the peoples who live there, approach, understand and engage in the future in different ways. Take Brisbane, with its convict history and its in-theshadow inferiority complex vis-à-vis the grander iconic cities of Sydney and Melbourne, Brisbanites tend to think of the future as something that happens elsewhere. But my sense as an outsider to this exceptionally multi-cultural city, is that there are futures begging to be released from the local story-pool with The Eleven Tomorrows the vehicle to facilitate the liberation of those suppressed stories of other futures.

Originally, the concept for The Eleven Tomorrows came from Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee & Cigarettes with its conversationdriven vignettes, chiefly around musicrelated themes. The Eleven Tomorrows flash fictions will comprise fiction, some nonfiction, experimental, and blurred pieces. Uniquely, the 11 writer-directors will not know what the other stories are and will only get to see all 11 films once at the premiere screening on March 1, 2023 - World Future Day.

Futures themes suggested to the BMM writers and directors include the futures of our universe and humanity’s role therein; global and localized environments; indigenous and multicultural futures; end of life and end of world stories; ancient versus 21st century futures such as divination and soothsaying in contrast to the emerging tech of big data, social media, virtual worlds, AI, surveillance, robots, drones and the other usual techno-utopia/ dystopia suspects; futures indifference; conflicting perspectives on time and futures; sexuality and bodies; futuresoriented jobs – from professional Futurists to micro-weather forecasters; futures neuroses – fear, phobias; humour in the future; transhumanism and posthumanism; and potentially any other futures issue the writers-directors have a passion for storifying.

Films that inform The Eleven Tomorrows either stylistically or thematically include MANIFESTO with its 13 personas all played by Kate Blanchett, David Byrne’s TRUE STORIES, Jim Jarmusch’s COFFEE & CIGARETTES - featuring multiple conversation-based stories predominantly with well-known American musicians, Jane Campion’s PASSIONLESS MOMENTS; Fellini’s surrealist masterpiece ROMA; Robert Altman’s 1993 American comedydrama SHORT CUTS, and Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s magic-realist DREAMS (1990), to name but a few.

The 11 flash fiction futures films that synergistically emerge from The Eleven Tomorrows project, will be premiered at f3, a futures film festival, slated for March 1, 2023. It is hoped that f3 will welcome an international audience that includes members of the World Futures Studies Federation as well as other futures and filmmaking communities around the world.

Film Review By David Lindsay-Wright