Catfish
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Catfish

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This low budget, fly on the wall documentary is the antithesis of David Fincher’s award winning drama The Social Network, which chronicled the origins of social networking site Facebook.

This low budget, fly on the wall documentary is the antithesis of David Fincher’s award winning drama The Social Network, which chronicled the origins of social networking site Facebook. This fascinating and thought provoking cinema verite-style documentary looks at the consequences and pitfalls of the explosion in social networking sites and the whole cyber communication phenomenon where technology has replaced face to face communication for this generation. This is also a cautionary tale that points out the very real dangers of sharing personal information and intimate details with a stranger via social networking sites. You can’t always be sure you know who you are talking to.

Catfish comes from three young aspiring New York filmmakers, and documents an on-line relationship. The trailers market the film as another “found footage” type thriller along the vein of The Blair Witch Project or Paranormal Activity, but nothing could be further from the truth. Catfish is the type of film you should know little about before seeing it, so as not to ruin the surprises or the denouement.

Nev Schulman is a New York based photographer who, in 2007, received an e-mail from an 8-year-old artistic prodigy named Abby. She asked permission to paint a picture based on one of his photographs that had been published in a magazine. Thus began an on-line correspondence between Nev and Abby. Nev also got to interact with the rest of her family, including her mother Angela, her father Vince, and older sister Megan. There are lots of photographs of Megan on her Facebook page, and Nev becomes infatuated with her.

Nev’s brother Ariel is a film maker who always has a camera around, and he and his business partner Henry Joost began to document this long distance relationship, with no idea where it would take them. Ariel and Henry use digital cameras and hidden microphones to good effect. The pair shot over 200 hours of footage, and edited into a brisk 89 minutes the film never outstays its welcome.

After a few months though Nev and Ariel began to grow suspicious that not all was kosher and decided to dig deeper into Abby’s life via You Tube and other on-line sources. They decide to take a trip to Abby’s hometown of Ishpeming in Michigan to check things out for themselves and put their fears to rest. They were not prepared for what they discovered.

The film ventures really deeply into the personal lives of its central protagonists, and the real details of Abby’s family are quite touching, even if the filmmakers seem a little unsure of how to effectively use the material here.

Since Catfish premiered at the Sundance Film festival, it has created something of a sensation, and has raised questions about its veracity. Debate has raged over whether it’s real or yet another fake “documentary”. How much of it was reshot after the fact? The Schulman brothers disingenuously insist that it’s all real, and shot as it happened. The film raises a number of ethical issues about the whole phenomenon of on-line socialising, the loss of privacy, and is also a poignant exploration of loneliness in this technologically savvy world.

It helps that Nev is quite a charismatic character with a natural screen presence, even though he seems a little gullible. The film itself is also quite well constructed and slickly edited by Zac Stuart-Pontier, and its rough edges somehow add to its raw appeal.