Cinemania (2003)

Synopsis: CINEMANIA is the highly-anticipated documentary about the culture of intense cinephilia in New York City that reveals the impassioned world of five wildly obsessed movie buffs. They spend their waking hours in darkened theaters, and... CINEMANIA is the highly-anticipated documentary about the culture of intense cinephilia in New York City that reveals the impassioned world of five wildly obsessed movie buffs. They spend their waking hours in darkened theaters, and now, these full-time audience members step from their seats onto the big screen in this entertaining new documentary which celebrates their obsessions -- from the grandiosity of their aesthetic dreams to the austerity of their domestic realities. In Cinemania, the Silver Screen's biggest fans become the true stars. This is the story of their lives, their memories, their unbending habits and the films they love. The five people who are the “stars” of CINEMANIA -- Jack, Eric, Harvey, Bill and Roberta -- are not meant to represent all film-buffs everywhere. Nor are they the exclusive representatives of New York's film-buff community -- this community is vast and has its own rich history -- and who doesn't in some way consider themselves a film-buff? What interested us about these people was the degree to which their love of film has seemed to eclipse all other concerns in their lives - and what filmmaker can not understand this kind of blind passion? The other star of this film is New York City itself -- and what other city (besides maybe Paris) could inspire the kind of lives lived by our obsessive film-buffs? Two filmmakers collaborated on this film, one a Berliner, the other a New Yorker -- both drawn to New York by the filmmaking opportunities and community here, and who discovered this sub-culture in the cinemas. One of the film's protagonists, Bill Heidbreder, says of film-buffs; "We're obviously important because we're the people that these great films are being made for." Probably unaware of how important they really are to the ecosystem of New York cine-culture, our film-buffs are the last of a dying breed of movie-goer who embody, we hope, the love we all share of those blissful moments in the darkened cinema, when we lose ourselves in the dreams on the screen. -- © Loop Filmworks [More]

Director: Angela Christlieb, Stephen Kijak

Director: Angela Christlieb, Stephen Kijak
Screenwriter: Angela Christlieb
Producer: Gunter Hanfgarn
Studio: Wellspring