Walter Woodman and Patrick Cederberg: Noah

Noah is a 17-min. long student film which was showed in the Short Cuts-program at this year’s Toronto Film Festival. Since it is entirely taking place on a teenage guy’s computer screen, it has lately – and logically – been spread on the internet through social networks.

Through a very clever and fast-paced “editing” with zooms and pans plus dialogue, video, pictures and text on-screen, we follow him and his online-behavior. He is Facebooking, Skyping with his girlfriend while surfing and then putting his relationship with her in peril by some quite questionable actions. After a series of events (or non-events, if you’re older than 25) he ends up on Chatroulette.com where he chats with different people at random.

Of course, this is not a documentary but it sure – at times – feels like one with its attention to detail and its pace. The speed really mimics the feeling you get when you’re trying to follow your 15 year old son or your teenage niece trying to show you something on a computer. But it is well worth it, because it is a glimpse of how our means of communications affect our social behavior.

You can argue that the main character is a scatterbrain and has the attention span of a common housefly. And you can say that this is brought on by the computer industry and when WE were young, we certainly had better things to do. But in my and my avatar’s opinion, the real message is that no matter how and through which apparatus or software we as humans interact with each other, we will always bring in our human emotions; our fears, joys, needs and hang-ups. And the film shows it in a way that I so far haven’t seen any well-meaning documentary about the subject do quite as engaging.

Canada, 2013.

The film can be seen here: http://www.fastcocreate.com/3017108/you-need-to-see-this-17-minute-film-set-entirely-on-a-teens-computer-screen