The Arc of Oblivion
ABOUT
With his latest project, filmmaker Ian Cheney manages to take a subject that’s really kind of dull-- what to do with his archive of hard drives) and spin it into a film that is both whimsical (the narrative arc is the construction of a literal ark, a landlocked one, on his parent’s property in rural Maine) and somehow also about life’s most existential questions: what it means be human on this planet, whether anything really lasts; life and death and our place within the universe and in the arc of history. Executive produced by Werner Herzog, who also makes an appearance (inside the ark, naturally).
Director Ian Cheney is an Emmy-nominated & Peabody Award-winning documentary filmmaker. He has completed ten feature documentaries, including King Corn (2007), The Greening of Southie (2008), The City Dark (2011), The Search for General Tso (2014), Bluespace (2015), The Most Unknown (2018), The Emoji Story (2019), Thirteen Ways (2019), Picture a Scientist (2020) and The Long Coast (2020). He received bachelor’s & master’s degrees from Yale University, and an MFA in Film from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. A former MacDowell Fellow & Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT, he lives in Maine.
CREDITS
Manette Pottle
Rebecca Taylor