| The Strange Rebirth of Andre Weil: Press Kit |
Press
Interview with Your It List here.
Born to be Nervous diary coverage here.
Screenings
• Topanga Film Festival (Aug 2009)
• San Francisco International Festival of Short Films (Sept 2009)
• Imagine Science Film Festival, New York (Oct 2009)
• WILDsound Film Festival, Toronto (Oct 2009), "Audience Award :: Best Overall Performances"
• Miami Short Film Festival (Nov 2009)
Short Synopsis
A boy meets girl... Boy gets shot in the head... Boy turns to God short film. Inspired by a true story.
Long Synopsis
Shot on black and white, Super 16mm film The Strange Rebirth of Andre Weil is a blackly comic love story that explores themes concerning the fragility of human consciousness and spirituality. When Andre meets Sasha it's something approximating love at first sight. She's an analog girl in a digital world. He's a hapless door-to-door salesman and notorious shut-in. Their romance becomes complicated by the introduction of Gil, an old professor of Sasha's with a nasty jealous streak. Using archival footage and a deadpan narration, The Strange Rebirth of Andre Weil loosely reconstructs the historic neurological case of Phineas Gage, who in the mid-1800s survived a freak accident in which a 13 foot metal rod shot through the frontal lobe of his brain and skull. Like Gage, Andre also suffers a traumatic brain injury and he too is transformed by the accident, reborn a new man. The Master of Fine Arts thesis project (San Francisco State University) of writer/director Joel Garber.
Project Background
Phineas Gage, a railroad foreman in the mid-1800s, suffered a freak accident in which a 13 foot metal rod shot through the frontal lobe of his brain. Though he survived, Gage was transformed. Previously known for his patience and thoughtfulness, Gage became a darker, more temperamental, and angry man. Gage’s case became famous for alerting the world of science to the compartmentalization of the human brain, and the fragility of the human personality.
Modern science is pre-occupied with understanding the brain and how it works. Newspapers and magazines constantly update us with the latest developments. It has recently been reported, for instance, that using a head-mounted virtual reality video display, scientists have been able to induce out-of-body experiences in healthy volunteers. New research on the brain points to a potential sea change in long held notions concerning consciousness, ethics, philosophy, art, and religion.
Traumatic brain injuries often lead to bizarre neurological conditions that are illuminating by virtue of their very oddness. Andre Weil, the film’s protagonist, suffers from one such condition, known as Temporal Lobe Epilepsy (TLE). A small number of sufferers of TLE have epileptic fits during which they experience intense spiritual sensations, often reporting that they are in touch with some God-like presence. It has been speculated that noted historical figures, from Joan of Arc to Fyodor Dostoevsky, endured undiagnosed cases of TLE.
Michael Persinger is a neuroscientist at Laurentian University in Ontario, Canada. In the 1980s he developed a device called the “God helmet,” a modified snowmobile helmet that is wired to create a weak magnetic field aimed precisely at the temporal lobes in the right hemisphere of the brain. The effect, in nearly 80% of participants, is the sensation of a palpable spiritual energy, mimicking the experience of a seizure in people with TLE. As Jack Hitt, writing for Wired Magazine puts it:
…after I adjust to the darkness and the cosmic susurrus of absolute silence, I drift almost at once into a warm bath of oblivion. Something is definitely happening. During the 35-minute experiment, I feel a distinct sense of being withdrawn from the envelope of my body and set adrift in an infinite existential emptiness…
What does it mean that a specific part of our brains control spiritual thought? What implications are to be drawn from the fact that, like Phineas Gage, we are all a single violent blow away from transforming into different people? These are the chief thematic concerns backgrounding The Strange Rebirth of Andre Weil and the foundation upon which the love story narrative is built.