I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why.
Like all art, the medium of cinema allows audiences to confront real issues by experiencing reality through someone else’s eyes, allowing us to empathise with these stories and characters. What they are experiencing on‐screen offers an outsiders perspective to similar situations in our own lives. Our emotional responses to these can feel real, and because of this we can cathartically acknowledge and purge buried feelings ‐ or at least try to.
12 Lonely Men is a self exploration into themes of loneliness, isolation and depression through shared experiences with characters in popular cinema. A series of cartoon portraits, this melancholic ensemble is an attempt to visually communicate through the use of empathy what can be a struggle to verbalise. Each of the referenced films tells a story about the selected character. They exist in the world that was written for them, and we as an audience have the opportunity to peer into their lives and share their experiences.
In 12 Lonely Men, these characters have been removed from their individual worlds and placed together to tell a different story, one of an individual’s attempts at making sense of their overwhelming dissatisfaction with life, with the comfort of knowing that you’re not alone in feeling alone.
12 Lonely Men opens at Courthouse Youth Arts, 60 Little Malop St, Geelong, Victoria on February 15th and will be running until March 27th.
Opening Night: Friday February 19th, 5:30 – 8:30pm