a film by cal and josh

 

 

 

WINNER AUDIENCE AWARD BEST FEATURE NARRATIVE San Francisco – SF Indiefest

WINNER BEST FEATURE FILM Sci-Fi LONDON Film Festival

OFFICIAL SELECTION

Los Angeles Film Festival
Lake Placid Film Forum
Gala Opening Night Premier San Francisco Independent Film Festival
IFP NEW YORK Left of Center Screening Series
Raindance LONDON Film Festival
Sci-Fi LONDON Film Festival

 

 

 

 

The Reviews...

"Powerful...a fascinating saga... superbly executed, surprisingly ambitious....and looks smashing on a big screen"

- The Hollywood Reporter

"EVER SINCE THE WORLD ENDED continually tickles the mind while leaving a heavy lump in the chest, establishing and sustaining a unique low-key tone of mystery and dread. ...should elicit significant attention from creative fests and distribs looking for the Next Thing in midnight programming."

- Variety

“Evokes memories of the best Twilight Zone tales, employing a powerful narrative and minimum of special effects to create a chilling vision of the not so distant future.”

- The Independent Film & Video Monthly

“Powerful”

- Filmmaker Magazine

"There are those films that settle into their generic codings and then there are those that rethink them. The brilliance of Grant and Litle’s re-imagining does not stop with story construction and seamless acting”

- Thomas Ethan Harris, Director IFP West/LAFF

“An engaging drama that raises intriguing questions”

- LA Weekly

“A hugely convincing portrait of a largely-collapsed civilization. After this was over, it was an enormous relief to walk out onto Sunset Boulevard and discover there were still people around.”

- Trash City

 

 

 

 

Synopsis 

“Ever Since The World Ended” is a character-driven “social science fiction” film about life after the end of the world. Twelve years after a devastating plague emptied the world of people, two San Francisco filmmakers traverse the nearly deserted City with a camera and a microphone. On a journey that will carry them far beyond the city limits and into the wilderness beyond, they begin to uncover the secrets of their new world. In a series of encounters and interviews with a handful of fellow survivors, they explore the harsh realities of life after civilization, revealing the day-to-day struggles for survival, the shifting moral imperatives, and the deep ideological rifts in a fledgling community trying to chart a way forward.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                                               

Los Angeles Film Festival reviews

 

LOS ANGELES -- Recalling many a post apocalypse fable but dashed off in the pulp medium of the present day – cheap digital cinema – “Ever Since the World Ended…” is stimulating, provocative and a little tough to swallow but overall a promising debut by filmmakers Joshua Litle and Calum Grant. 

         One could easily imagine a studio remake costing millions, but the solid writing of this “social science fiction” story find ways to make the complicated lives of postplague survivors a fascinating saga of hanging on to life as we know it with very little functioning 20^th century technology, no formal government, no contact with other peoples and no way to ever go back. 

         Only 186 people remain in the greater San Francisco Bay area.  It’s been 12 years since a plague wiped out the vast majority of humans.  Following years of instability and lawlessness, the deceptively meek ones left have reached a level of trust and tolerance, but they rarely leave San Francisco and are not above making ruthless decisions against perceived enemies of the peace.

         Reveling in it back-to-nature details that are entertainingly spaced out by the interview format – from basic power and food concerns to the dangers outside the city and internal group decisions like conceiving children – “Ever” starts like “The Blair Witch Project” meets “The Omega Man” and then gets better.  Improvising, shooting only using available light, the filmmakers and cast are terrifically consistent in fleshing out the material – which becomes more powerful by the transparent “reality-based” comfort level of the premise; including the “makers” of the documentary we are watching providing brief commentary and a structure to the experience.

         Any way you let it sneak up on you, “Ever” is scary stuff, evoking the cold vibes of such doomsday flicks as “12 Monkeys” and “A Boy and His Dog.”  But it’s also downright witty in places like the funny comments of the “last Native American” (Ed Noisecat), who is weary of being the totem for everyone’s spiritual longing.  Grant and Litle take credit for directing and producing; the former is the writer, and the latter is the credited cinematographer. 

         Filmed in widescreen in the mini-DV format, “Ever” was edited on home computers and looks smashing on a big screen.  Standouts among the cast are Mark Routhier as a sinister outsider who dares to return from exile, David Driver as a business-minded-scavenger and Adam Savage as a pragmatic conserver of vanishing technology.  There are many more fully realized characters – doctors, surfers, teachers, tree dwellers, hunters, young adults who don’t know the way it was before, a few children and deadly strangers – in this superbly executed surprisingly ambitious film. (David Hunter)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ever Since The World Ended

 An Epidemic Films production. Produced by Calum Grant, Joshua Atesh Litle. Executive producer, Kate Montgomery. Directed by Calum Grant, Joshua Atesh Litle. Screenplay, Grant. 

With: Calum Grant, Adam Savage, Mark Routhier, Angie Thieriot, Josiah Clark, Jessica Viola, Dan Plumlee, Linda Noveroske, Ronald Chase, James Curry, Brad Olsen, Ed Noisecat, Simon Thieriot, Stewart Fallon, Dr. Mary Rutherord. 

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By ROBERT KOEHLER

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Beginning with its inspired title, Calum Grant's and Joshua Atesh Litle's apocalyptic "Ever Since the World Ended" continually tickles the mind while leaving a heavy lump in the chest, establishing and sustaining a unique low-key tone of mystery and dread. While the premise of a global plague wiping out most of the world's population -- and reducing numbers in story's central locale of the San Francisco Bay Area to a mere 186 -- would seem to require massive resources and spectacular horror, pic is framed as an intimate document authored by Cal (Grant), who interviews various survivors 10 years after the catastrophe. This response to both AIDS and "The Blair Witch Project" should elicit significant attention from creative fests and distribs looking for the Next Thing in midnight programming.

Speaking in hushed tones but determined to provide a record of events, documentarian Cal sets out to talk to a range of folks who've managed to escape a malevolent virus that spread with such parabolic extremity that it remains the No. 1 conversation topic a decade later. A doctor (Dr. Mary Rutherord) still looks fatigued contemplating the disaster, and scavenging surfer dudes (Simon Thieriot, Stewart Fallon) happily live off the land and joke that they'd prefer to be disposed of as fish bait and shot out of a cannon. Small groups break into barricaded homes to find the dead and extract useful items for the living, while a commune of sorts headed by Mama Eva (Angie Thieriot) studiously tries to maintain civilization with music and conversations about parenting.

The filmmakers cleverly insert elements of drama and conflict into a world where ostensibly nothing should be happening except sheer survival. Mad Mark (Mark Routhier), a former emergency worker caught up in the urge to set fires, had been exiled into the dangerous outlying countryside for a few years but has now returned to the city. Despite his agitated-sounding promises to mend his ways,

Mark's presence triggers hot discussions in the communal household, which is the closest thing S.F. now has to a city council and government.

The debate raises moral questions regarding who shall live and who shall die, and even the purposes of civilized society, to an unexpected level of consideration -- particularly so when the debate is eventually resolved in ways that call into question the remaining shards of that civilization.

Cal works up the courage to trek north of the city with a "traveler" named Santosh (Brad Olsen), into the now-savage hinterlands of Marin (a nice Bay Area joke, since that area is the region's toniest), where he encounters Dan (Dan Plumlee), once an everyday city guy now trapping for game. It's here that pic loses some verisimilitude, since Dan hardly looks like he's been in the wilds for six days, let alone six years. And in the city itself, there's little indication of decaying physical infrastructure, an element that a standard SF thriller would hardly overlook but which this deliberately non-tech, intimate mock-docu cannot completely ignore either.

An attack that leaves Santosh mortally wounded is shot in the style of combat photography, adding another layer to the film's visual and dramatic dynamics. Thesping is of a piece with pic's conceit as a "found" docu, rarely betraying any sense of playacting for Grant's and Litle's mobile cameras. The pair opted to shoot in PAL process -- marking a considerable improvement in visual resolution over more common NTSC digital video -- as well as a highly unusual widescreen aspect ratio that frees video from constraints of a TV-like image.