Here's to the Future!

On a late-summer Sunday in 2011, a female director (Telaroli herself) gathers a team of filmmakers, writers, musicians, artists, critics, and friends in an apartment to recreate a scene from Michael Curtiz's Depression-era drama The Cabin in the Cotton. Over plates of pasta and glasses of red wine, a round robin of actors take turns performing the same scene, again and again, in different permutations. With a freedom influenced by pre-Code Hollywood, cameras, phones, and laptops are scattered around the set at almost every possible angle, documenting the action -- both in front of and behind the camera -- as it unfolds, from rehearsals to equipment adjustments to the banter between takes. An intimate, playful, and spontaneous look into the collaborative cinematic process emerges, a snapshot of the filmmaker's perennial struggle to capture fleeting moments before the day (and light) slip away.

HERE'S TO THE FUTURE! is a hybrid work that blurs several lines -- between reality and fiction, between a movie and its "making of," between Old Hollywood and present-day independent cinema, between film criticism and filmmaking, between structuralist rigor and a loose hangout vibe inspired by Howard Hawks' Hatari! -- to create something strange and new.