Things rarely seem easy for Abel Ferrara, an artist whose tough, uncompromised vision often makes difficult the acquiring of funds — and even when the man can get something made, it doesn’t always get out in his preferred form. So it’s no surprise that, following the Welcome to New York debacle (to say nothing of the fact that Pasolini isn’t any closer to U.S. distribution now than it was in August), he’s using Kickstarter and Twitter to push Siberia, “a subjective and objective journey into the subconscious” that will use Carl Jung’s Red Book as a launch pad for “[exploring] the language of dreams, myth and the natural world.”
That and many other phrases of the sort (“a visual interpretation of the universal issues”) define the page, which nevertheless lets up a bit about what Ferrara and frequent co-scribe Chris Zois have concocted. Case in point:
“We begin in an outpost far north of Jack London country where CLINT holds out with his partner MITCHELL, (Willem Dafoe in both roles) serving coffee, sympathy and an odd video game to passing strangers. All seems at one in this strange cafe. Appearance is deceptive as CLINT begins to cross the line between what is real and what is not. He is thrust on a journey across his psyche into distant lands, of epic natural beauty and the darkness of his own past and future. Soul searching by dog sled.”
Not that this — or the first few pages of the script, which are made available on their page, or some curious notices about location-scouting — lays out where, exactly, Siberia heads, but the promise of another Ferrara-Dafoe outing, the intrigue of what’s been stated, and the importance of supporting someone, anyone with this filmmaker’s vision make the Kickstarter rather difficult to ignore. All they need is your attention — and about $491,000. Do what you can to help out.
What do you make of Siberia, based on these initial details? Would you like to soon see another Ferrara film?