Event

THE INSTITUTE

Spencer McCall's documentary about the Jejune Institute is a must see for anyone who calls the Bay Area home. So much of the culture and character, the artists, the inventors, the visionaries, the seekers, the mystics, the poets, the dreamers, is brought into relief in the story of those who found themselves transported into this mysterious world lovingly devised by the Jejune Institute. THE INSTITUTE is a film about meticulous spontaneity, about restoring our sense of amazement at seemingly ordinary things, in a time of aggressive enforced lack of interest in anything that dares step outside of a painfully predictable and predetermined "reality" bias. Yep it's that good.

Mysterious phone calls, public dancing with a B-boy and a Sasquatch, inductive and deductive reasoning, and a constant interrogation of reality together make Spencer McCall's THE INSTITUTE an engaging, intriguing, and ultimately empowering cinematic experience. The film centers on the tensions between real and manufactured narrative, forcing us to ask whether these distinctions matter. Are the events depicted in THE INSTITUTE a game? A performance? A psycho-geographic approach to investigating San Francisco? Or something else altogether? The audience is left to conclude is this augmented reality... Or reality augmented?