A Note From The Director
Just as those old instamatic still cameras were once a common tool for amateur photographers, affordable cine cameras have played an important role in the chronicle of our lives.
I can still recall our family vacations, my father with his trusty Bell & Howell 8mm Sportster, turning the winding key and hearing the film run through the camera gate. A week later, after the film was developed at the local drugstore, the family would gather together and the lights dimmed as we sat on the shag carpet of our living room waiting for the projector to beam its magic above our heads onto the screen at the other side of the room.
READ MOREDad's camera work was often shaky and his shots weren't always in focus, but there we all were, my brother, sister and myself, our childhoods recorded on film for posterity. Those films are living documents, the proof that we had a childhood and had grown up in a specific house, on a specific street, in a specific town in America. At an early age, I became aware of the power of cinema.
I've always wanted to make a movie that celebrates that power and 'The Camera' is that film. A contemporary love story at heart, it's also a tribute to a filmmaking style that rejected the traditional notion of movies as pure fantasy that couldn't possibly address the intimacies of everyday relationships between people. The New Wave filmmakers of the 1950s and 1960s changed that and for the first time in cinema's storied history, the camera became a central character in the telling of the story.
Cinema at its finest captures the truth in ordinary moments, just as my father did through the lens of his Bell & Howell. Watching the story of a movie unfold is a journey of discovery; it's an opportunity to laugh and cry and remember the days when film was still film and life a bit simpler. Movies have the ability not only to entertain us, but to change our lives. This once was and can still be, in my opinion, the purpose of filmmaking.
TERRY GREEN (Screenwriter/Director)