Chain

"Chain" is a narrative feature film built from a base of documentary footage. For five years, filmmaker Jem Cohen has been shooting at sites including Los Angeles, New Jersey, South Carolina, Berlin, Eastern Europe and Rotterdam, documenting new landscapes that share a strange, indeterminate quality. Using the landscape itself as a major "character" or subtext, it will serve as mortar for a series of linked stories: a blackout finds a man and woman stuck in a skyscraper, a runaway lives under a giant highway overpass, a traveler shares memories of a California earthquake with a young stranger. The film will carefully intersperse scenes with actors among existing footage, constructing simple stories out of real world materials.