Michael M. Bilandic’s films combine cyberpunk aesthetics, rave-inspired colour palettes and hilarious screenplays. Starting out as a PA for original NYC bad boy Abel Ferrara, Bilandic explores the changing face of the city, often through the eyes of artists or idealists lingering on the precipice of total irrelevance.
While Bilandic’s work is consistently funny, there remains a pervasive sense of melancholy, with evident sympathy for the precarity of his characters and an incisive perspective on the eternal struggle between the cynics and the dreamers.
His 2011 debut Happy Life centres on an ageing techno enthusiast who attempts to save his record store by throwing an “old-skool” rave in an abandoned building, convincing a legendary MC called DJ Liquidz (played by Gilles Decamps) to come out of retirement for the night. 2013’s Hellaware sees a struggling photographer stumble upon a Juggalo rap-rock group in Delaware during a coke-fuelled YouTube deep-dive. He decides to make the face-painted, shitfaced teens the subject of his next project, ruthlessly exploiting their adolescent earnestness for his own means. Finally, the protagonist of 2018’s Jobe’z World is a middle-aged rollerblader / sci-fi fanatic / drug dealer, tasked with making a drop to his favourite movie star only to end up on the lam after the actor is found dead in his home.
All his films are available now to rent on THE DEEPER MOVIES CHANNEL