Q&A: Director Blake Pruitt on ‘CAMCHAT’

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Having its Canadian Premiere at the Fantasia Film Festival preceding Gregg Araki’s latest film WHITE BIRD IN A BLIZZARD, CAMCHAT is 20 year-old NYC filmmaker Blake Pruitt’s short experimental look into online relationships.

In this age of immediacy and an isolated togetherness, where apps allow a user to literally swipe a finger across a screen as their decision whether to sleep with someone or not, Pruitt gives us his take on these solitary buy cheapest viagra online cyber moments, with an emphasis on sharing queer stories.

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What inspired you to make levitra show pill CAMCHAT?

It’s become a cliché to point out how connected yet how alone we all are because of the internet, but that’s because it’s true. Most of what we would call online dating or an online relationship is more of a self-serving projection of one’s own needs and insecurities onto exchanged texts (sans tone) and a couple shirtless photos. Basically, a lot of people are really fucking lonely and whether they’re just trying to get off or looking for a husband, these brief interactions we have online don’t usually get us anywhere. So camchat comes from some personal experiences and some imagined experiences, but they all connect to these instances of desperation and loneliness that gay men in New York, even though there are a couple hundred thousand of us on one island, seem to keep instigating for ourselves and each other.

What do you think the ease of an immediate, canada cialis no prescription direct connection to people with similar interests provides?

It’s really easy to complain about these internal issues that I’ve experienced as a twenty one year-old cis white gay man in 2014 when I’m lucky to even have the ability to reach other queer people in such a quick, easy way and not have to put myself in danger in any way to do so. But while it’s very easy to make these immediate connections to other gay men, it’s also easy to build up an image of yourself and an image of the person you’re interacting with; obviously this has always been the problem with meeting anyone online since way back when people still had AOL email addresses. But if you just turn your phone off for 24 hours, you’ll realize you just stop worrying about how a perfectly pleasant conversation turned to a string of increasingly desperate, unreturned messages.

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Is the advancement of technology with apps such as Grindr etc..something that you find objectifies sexuality or gives a better outlet for it?

I honestly can’t fathom how much of my life I’ve wasted on Grindr in the 3 years I’ve been on it, but it’s also great for material and just personal amusement. I’ve become this crazy activist old man yelling at guys a year younger than me for using language like “Are you clean?” or for projecting their own insecurities on the gay community. All of these apps and websites are just neutral tools to meet other people; you can use them in a way that objectifies your own or others’ sexuality or in a way that works as a healthy outlet for you.

What would you like to do/show most with CAMCHAT?

With CAMCHAT, I’m trying to give the sense of what it feels like to accumulate these online interactions and how they become so integrated into one character’s experience of the world. I care more about what a viewer feels when the film is over than the narrative journey they went on; the films that stay with me are ones that I associate with certain feelings, not ones whose narrative structure impressed me the most.

What do you hope to accomplish with the films you create in general?

I want to tell queer stories and share queer experiences that haven’t been told. This is mostly selfish because there are so many queer films that are just waiting to be made, so there are viagra to order endless idea opportunities. But also, as much as I love straight people, there are a lot of movies about you guys, so I’m just trying to write what I know and bring something a little gayer to the mix.

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CAMCHAT plays before WHITE BIRD IN A BLIZZARD on July 22 at 3:00pm. Details on the film page here: http://www.fantasiafestival.com/2014/en/films-schedule/208/white-bird-in-a-blizzard

About the author:

Esinam Beckley

Esinam Beckley is a student at the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies.

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