Going Back to Meet the World

Director’s Statement

‘Going Back to Meet the World’ is an attempt to make sense of four years spent in art school. It explores the experiences that the arts are an industrious environment; that as much as things seem to change in the socio-political arena, people are people; and that wanting to belong tends to background all other desires.

It is an experiment in translating reality into a fictional record of the people and spaces during a specific time in someone’s life. No auditions were held nor roles cast, and as such, no professional actors were on set. Everyone plays a version of themselves, a version that we discovered through rehearsals and conversations about the situations highlighted by the film. The themes explored surfaced from recent observations, for example, that artists and blue collar workers are cut from the same cloth, that it’s very hard for men to make friends in their thirties, and that some people, like Becca, go right for what they want and others, like Mark, build complex institutional paths out of simple desires.

This film brings together elements of humor, sadness, shame, failure, and beauty. The film benefits from effective and realistic performances, richness of the subtext (whether material through production design, or through backgrounded conversations), use of long takes, and avoidance of punch lines (for the most part) as it lays out intricate emotional processes onto classic narrative plot structures.

Screenings

‘Going Back to Meet the World’ had its world premiere at the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma in Montreal from October 10 – 12, 2022 where it won the Grand Prize for the RPCÉ presented by Netflix.