Suffused in Derring-do
Believe me when I say that I was tempted, really temped, to circumvent the Saturday, June 8, 2 p.m. embargo so that I could be the first to shout to the heavens: See this movie!
Screenings
Saturday, June 8, 2 p.m. – Village East Cinema – 7
Press & Industry: Monday, June 10, 3:15 p.m. – AMC 19th St. #5
Tues, June 11, 8:15 p.m. – Village East Cinema – #2
Saturday, June 15, 5:45 p.m. – Village East Cinema – 3
*P&I screening is for Tribeca-accredited Press & Industry only
Embargoed till Saturday, June 8 at 2 ET.
THEY’RE HERE tells a story about several upstate New Yorkers who say they have had close encounters with UFOs AKA UAPs. They are not portrayed in the polished documentary of Directors Pacho Velez and Daniel Claridge as whacky, nor particularly eccentric. They come across as everyday people. Some have had more than their share of derision for being public about sharing their outer worldly experiences.
THEY’RE HERE is listed in Viewpoints, Tribeca’s cinematic category for derring-do filmmaking, new voices and directors with panache.Directors like Daniel Claridge and Pacho Velez who dare to put the pedal to the mettle when it comes to making films. Thus, this reviewer only hints at the filmmakers reference to their “empathetic approach” to making this film because to do otherwise might amount to a spoiler. But I pontificate about their cinematic methodology for making this movie that many in an audience will want to see more than once.
Cookie Stringfellow.
The featured characters – real life folks, not actors – appearing in THEY’RE HERE are members of an upstate New York’s UFO scene and are to be taken seriously. There’s Cookie Stringfellow, who says she is a former abductee. She runs a monthly paranormal meet-up group. There’s Steve Falcone, a metal worker, who says he relies on hypnosis to try to help him recall what he believes are “blocked” memories of his alien encounters and misadventures. The filmmakers want audiences to check their empathetic levels.
And then, there’s Twon Wood, a rising comic who spins his UFO encounters into material for the stand-up comedy routine that he is developing. And last but not least, there’s Dave Rivera, a gas station attendant whose video capture of a mysterious things created woes for him. He dared to go public about his close encounter. A reputable critic reviewing the video insisted that Rivera’s filming was really an errant weather balloon, that opinion making Rivera an unpleasant target of public humiliation.
Excerpts of The Directors Statement: Say What!?!
Directors Daniel Claridge & Pacho Velez said they spoke to dozens and dozens of New Yorkers who told them in interviews that they had seen UFOs and UAPs. The interviewees were everyday people, including engineers, government employees, building contractors and nurses. Instead of responding to those accounts skeptically critics or as credulous devotees, the directors went with a different method strategy. They used a questioning-interviewing approach to try to “understand the personal significance” of interviewees’ encounters, acknowledging the porous line between inner experience and outer reality.
Director Pacho Velez.
“Ultimately, we directed the documentary THEY’RE HERE through this fuzzy lens, privileging the world as our characters experience it over the world as our camera photographs it.” What they did was what they describe as creatively intervening in the events of the film, investing their stories with the magic and mystery of the world as they see it.” Hoo-rah!
“We hope that our empathic approach illuminates the longing for transcendent experience in the modern world.”
In recent years, UFOs, rebranded as UAPs, or Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon, have re-entered the public consciousness via congressional panels, declassified Navy videos and national news stories reported as news to be seriously taken.
Director Daniel Claridge.
The attention follows a record 100,000+ sightings reported by everyday Americans over the past two decades, the largest uptick since the UFO phenomenon first entered the American imagination in 1947 with the Roswell incident. The Roswell incident refers to the 1947 crash of a United States Army Air Forces balloon near Roswell, New Mexico.
Operated from the nearby Alamogordo Army Air Field and part of the top secret Project Mogul, the balloon was intended to detect Soviet nuclear tests. Wreckage fragments and remains, according to a variety of online archives, were recovered by Roswell Army Air Field personnel, and the U.S. Army released a statement about their possession of a “flying disc.”
This announcement made international headlines but was subsequently retracted. The Army ended up stating that a conventional weather balloon had crashed.
Of course, encounters with mysterious lights in the sky are nothing new. According to the filmmakers, otherworldly close encounters have inspired people to stop and reevaluate their lives. Convinced that the human side of these events is more interesting than the astronomical one, and struck by the large number of reported UFO sightings in our home state of New York, Daniel Claridge and Pacho Velez said they set out to explore the transforaminal power of these encounters in the lives of ordinary people.
What Wikipedia says about UFOs and UAPs.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence Preliminary Assessment of UAPs (Unclassified)
Executive Producers: Joe Poletto, Sam Roseme and Cathy Tankosic. Cinematographer: Daniel Claridge. Editors: Daniel Claridge and Pacho Velez. Sound Recordist: Pacho Velez. Composer: Jason Staczek. Sound Designer and Re-Recording Mixer: António Porém Pires.
Director Daniel Claridge is a documentary filmmaker from Schenectady, New York, whose directorial credits include The Queen’s Man (2019, co-directed with Andrew Coffman, DOC NYC) and the short film Dragstrip (2015, co-directed with Pacho Velez, TIFF & NYFF). Daniel wrote and edited the VR experience Persuasion Machines (2020, Sundance).
Director Pacho Velez is a New York-based nonfiction filmmaker whose films include Manakamana (2013, co-directed with Stephanie Spray, Locarno Film Festival – Golden Leopard), Searchers (2021, Sundance), The Reagan Show (2017, co-directed with Sierra Pettengill, Tribeca) and The American Sector (2020, co-directed with Courtney Stephens, Berlinale).
Attending: Directors Daniel Claridge and Pacho Velez and film participants Steve Falcone, Twon Wood, Dave Rivera and others.
Editor, Publisher Gregg W. Morris gregghc@comcast.net, profgreggwmorris@gmail.com