Video: 5 Hour Commercial

Thanks to Melinda Mahaffey Icden for sending along this item from D Magazine: Was a 5-Hour Commercial the Most Ambitious Movie at this Year’s Dallas Film Festival?

As in years past, the Dallas International Film Festival, which wrapped up this past weekend, offered a mix of independent features and documentaries, compelling slates of short films (always a highlight at the Dallas IFF), a handful of repertory screenings, and some celebrity moments.

When writing about the festival over the years, I’ve batted around a number of ideas about what kind of film festival the Dallas IFF could mature into. Once upon a time it had grand ambitions of being of a Toronto of the south. There have been moments when it seemed to be scrambling to pick up quality films that slipped through the cracks of bigger, more established fests. Now it seems to have settled into its role as a confident regional festival with a strong sense of its audience and an eye for spotting little films that wind up catching buzz later on in the year.

Quietly, however, the Dallas International Film Festival did something fairly radical this year, something that may suggest a new attitude or approach to the way cinema interacts with digital media, or the way curated festivals embrace sponsored or advertorial content. On the first full day of the festival, Dallas IFF screened a five-and-a-half hour commercial.

I can hear the purists groan in reaction to the idea of screening a commercial at a film festival. The stunt wasn’t a first for the Dallas IFF. A few years ago the festival screened what essentially amounted to an infomercial by a DFW-area property developer. That kind of thing could be potentially dangerous for a film festival, stoking a reputation that sponsors may pay-to-play their way into a festival’s programming while undermining the festival’s overall credibility.

But this latest screening was something different. The film is called Blah Airlines, and rather than a simple infomercial for a sponsor, in this case Virgin America, it is perhaps the most high-concept advertisement ever created. Sure it was a piece of promotion slipped into the festival’s programming, but the Virgin America commercial may also have been the most adventurous, avant-garde piece of cinema at this year’s Dallas IFF.

A 5 hour commercial, you say? Yes, indeed. And here it is:

OMG. I watched three minutes and wanted to barf. This is a kind of uncanny valley meets cinema verite experience and it ratchets my loathing of air travel from a 10 to an 11… one louder.

See how long you can stomach this real-time flight from Newark to San Francisco inhabited solely by dummies, then ask this question: What type of creative mindset could possibly come up with this concept for a commercial? 5 hours… with dummies?

For the rest of the D Magazine article, go here.