EVER SINCE THE WORLD ENDED

The Golden Gate Bridge is dilapidated and unused. Famous buildings have been run-down and empty for over a decade. The only sounds in the entire city come from the birds flying over it. It's absolutely chilling.

Synopsis: Twelve years after the Kotto plague reduces the population of the Bay Area to 186, local filmmakers Calum Grant and Joshua Atesh Litle interview as many survivors as possible, document the empty San Francisco streets, and undertake a hazardous journey into the savage hinterlands of Marin County. With no zombies and limited special effects, this film gently, thoughtfully and humorously examines how we might start again, left to our own devices. Awards: San Francisco Indiefest '02 (Audience Award - Best Narrative Feature), London Film Festival '02 (Best Feature Film - Sci-Fi)

Review: In this brilliant movie, whose concept lies somewhere between The Stand and 12 Monkeys, a pair of filmmakers, living in a world in which 12 years ago, plague decimated the human population to a tiny fraction of what it once was, decides to start interviewing the remaining 186 citizens of San Francisco about their thoughts and experiences of that catastrophic event. With a mesmerizing atmosphere of realism and sometimes disconcertingly relevant insight, Ever Since the World Ended quietly makes us believe in a frighteningly possible alternate reality.

The filmmakers' interviewees include: a woman running a shelter for women and children, a man who teaches teenagers about the Old World, a man who breaks into houses that were vacuum-sealed during the plague, a man whose permanent residence is a tree, a group of friends who venture outside the city for the first time in their lives, the last living Native American on the planet ("People are always coming up to me and asking me to explain their nightmares and shit!"), and others.

It's genuinely disconcerting to hear a new generation of young adults who have never really experienced living in a world full of people. If you thought the generation gap had widened since the advent of the internet, imagine what a chasm exists between those who spent most of their lives in civilization and those who have next to no recollection of such a thing. On camera, one of the filmmakers reviews old footage from before the plague of crowds of people going up and down an escalator. "If any of the kids today saw this, they just wouldn't believe it," he says. "They'd ask, 'Where are all those people coming from?'"

I've seen a few fictional documentaries and was always bothered by the way speech that is supposed to sound real and spontaneous still sounds like a line-reading. The actors in Ever Since the World Ended clearly improvised most, if not all, of what they say on camera; what really sells the whole film is how convincing it is put together. The details of the plague are never spelled out for us in the film, because anyone in the film's world who would see it already knows all about it. We get brief explanations of how people manage to get things like power and drinking water. It's startling at first, but ultimately part of the film's realism, the degree of normalcy these citizens' lives have attained. On a very basic level, everyday living is not much different. It's the big things that have changed. (At one point, a group of friends enjoy a hearty laugh when one of them forgets to take off her guns before sitting down at the dinner table.)

Occasionally between footage from interviews we see footage of the city itself: vast, silent, and almost lifeless. The Golden Gate Bridge is dilapidated and unused. Famous buildings have been run-down and empty for over a decade. The only sounds in the entire city come from the birds flying over it. It's absolutely chilling.

I felt like I was spying on a parallel universe while watching this movie. Every moment of Ever Since the World Ended is infused with a sense of raw truth that I'm astounded they were able to create, considering what I was being asked to believe. Don't miss it.