ABOUT THE MOVIE

George Gittoes is an artist, a risk taker, a loner, a renegade, a philosopher, a non-conformist. He has mentors and friends in the artists of the past – Goya, Van Gogh, Beckmann, Delaney – but carves out his own road in the present, with an artistic journey that is 24/7, kaleidoscopic, global, chaotic, intense and audacious.

Gittoes latest feature film The Miscreants of Taliwood is a mind blowing mix of doc and drama, darkness and light, which does some serious film rule bending and asks: What is real, what is unreal and what is too real? (In a globalized, virtualized world, polarising around us into stone age vs digital.)

Gittoes gets himself into the most foreign and frightening places on the globe and enters cultures (as a lone artist) at climatic points of meltdown. The Miscreants of Taliwood, is a take-no-prisoners cinema experience, a hair raising, often hilarious, action (for real) adventure, through a (all too real) forbidden zone (the theatre of contest for the next world order).

It is the final film in his Feature Doc NO EXIT Trilogy, all made at the front line of the War on Terror.

Each film in NO EXIT takes us to a ‘forbidden zone’ (US invaded Baghdad for SOUNDTRACK TO WAR, the rap-thug black-hood of Bush’s backyard-Miami, for RAMPAGE, Bin Laden’s backyard for MISCREANTS).

The NO EXIT films were formed through a rigorous creative process: started without script, simply a premise, ridden in on Gittoes ‘instincts’ about hot zones and what works in front of a camera. They employ his signature style of dangerous disregard, his get right in and up close to the real (and real within the real) with camera rolling. In The Miscreants of Taliwood he dislocates back and front of camera, playing both to it and behind it, with a great sense of fun and disregard for the rules of ‘proper filmmaking’.

In 2007-8, Gittoes set up his artist’s studio in the ancient city of Peshawar in the North West frontier of Pakistan, to work on this film, the most complex and mature work of his Bush Era-NO EXIT Trilogy. It is the tour de force of his unique ability to access the inaccessible and work between the big picture and the human transit of ‘the moment’.

Gittoes finds fellow artists, in all the trappings of their situations and allows the audience into these surprising friendships and moments of creativity, struck up in the most difficult of places. As we got to know the young soldiers-musicians next to their tanks in Iraq, the African-American rappers in Brown Sub, Miami, in The Miscreants of Taliwood we meet the crazily costumed, beleaguered, telie movie actors of Peshawar.

Never short of momentum, The Miscreants of Taliwood, gathers an astonishing cast of characters, in the Gittoes-led journey from Peshawar into the North West Frontier, as they dodge the anti entertainment forces (Taliban and Al Queada), to make the ‘last telie movie’ – an over the top action drama, played out in what must be one of the craziest locations on the planet – just a cave or two away from where the most wanted man in the world reportedly runs ‘Terror Central’.

The Miscreants of Taliwood is Gittoes in full stride as one of the most left field chronicler’s of our times.

Contact: director@GITTOES-dalton-films.com

 

WHAT THE CRITICS HAVE SAID

First Reviews from Audience Preview Screenings:

Hailed as a Post Modern Masterpiece, "one of the most rollicking and rip-roaring big-screen documentaries in years...The Miscreants is simply a masterpiece." (Julian Shaw: Anarchic Narrator. FilmInk Sept 9, 2008
www.filmink.com.au/news/the-anarchic-narrator (Australian Press)

"Even by the unholy standards of George Gittoes' unconventional career, The Miscreants sets a new standard in audacious and courageous filmmaking."

Paul Kalina. The Age (Australian Press)