For those lucky enough to attend the Berlin Film Festival, they will be able to catch the thirty minute Spike Jonze short film “Scenes From The Suburbs” based around Arcade Fire‘s latest album “The Suburbs,” at one of its four screenings. The rest of us will have to wait, but for now a new poster recently debuted on the band’s website, will have to suffice.
The band’s frontman Win Butler told Pitchfork in August that the clip was “a short film” rather than a video, “a science-fiction B-movie companion piece for the record. Basically we played Spike some music from the album and the first images that came to his mind had the same feeling as this idea for a science fiction film I had when I was younger. My brother and I and Spike wrote it together, which was really fun—it was like total amateur hour. We shot it in Austin and a lot of kids are in the film, and it was great just hanging out with these 15-year-olds for a week.” And now courtesy of the Berlin Film Festival website, we have a few more enigmatic details on the film: “A group of suburban youths. Back then, in the summer, so long ago. They couldn’t leave town because outside the country was at war and the military controlled life and all gateways. The teenagers wander aimlessly about town. Winter is a long way off. And love and longing and friendship still mean– everything.”
Still no word on when the rest of us will get to see the short, but surely Arcade Fire will prep a fancy release. The film features a cast of unknowns revealed to be Sienne Blau, Sam Dillon, Zoe Graham, Zeke Jarmon, Paul Pluymen and Ashlin Williamson and as the credits on the site confirm, was written by Jonze and the brothers Butler. Also rather exciting, the credits reveal that Greig Fraser, one of our cinematographers on-the-rise, and the man responsible shooting films like “Bright Star” and “Let Me In” took on DoP duties here. Nice.
The video is below the band calls “some kind of trailer” — it should give a taste of what’s in store. Full poster below that as well. [via Pitchfork]