Ghosts With Shit Jobs

director: Chris McCawley, Jim Morrison, Jim Munroe, Tate Young

screenwriter: Jim Munroe

cinematography: Joshua Fraiman, Josh Henderson

editing: Tate Young

cast: Rachel MacMillan, Sean Lerner, Jonah Hundert, Taylor Katz, Kelly Spilchak, Jason Wrubell

producer: Anthony Cortese, Jim Munroe

production: No Media Kings

sales: No Media Kings

awards: Sci-Fi London IFF 2012 – Best Feature

 

In the year 2040, Western world's economy lies in ruins. After declaring bankruptcy North America and Europe become the main source of cheap labor for the new economic powers - India and China. To survive, residents of the fallen cities of the Old World are forced to perform the most thankless jobs of the future, for minimum wage. Brothers, Anton and Toph are silk collectors, more specifically - cobwebs. They collect cobwebs left in the recesses of the city after the invasion of enormous mutant spiders. Serena works with a new form of spam. Her job is to weave in, and stay undetected, as many advertising slogans as possible into social conversations. Gary and Karen, a married couple, assemble and provide care for exclusive child robots which behave strikingly similar to real babies. And Oscar is a digital janitor, who stays immersed in a virtual reality for hours, tearing and painting over advertisements on the walls. We look at those characters together with a team of Chinese filmmakers, who were sent from behind the curtain of prosperity to try to capture the hardships and toil of everyday life of the people in the New Third World.

Ghosts With Shit Jobs is a brilliant Sci-Fi satire. Using today's concerns about the present economic climate, it shows what could happen if some of the current technological, economic and social trends were brought to the extreme. Such topics as robotics industrialization, ownership rights in the digital world, or a psycho-aggressive marketing are developed here with the comic zest and a great ingenuity. Despite its futuristic perspective, it stays rooted in the present day with focus shifted from special effects to a credible outline of the characters. The world of the Ghosts often looks disturbingly familiar ...

[Grzegorz Kurek]