Upstream Color

Cinema

Shane Carruth is an American film writer, director, and actor who started off as a math major and subsequently a developer of flight simulation software.  From his passion for numbers and science was born his first film, "Primer” (2004).  Ten years after this debut, his second feature film, “Upstream Color" (2013), was released, the winner of the Special Jury Award for Sound Design at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. 

"If something can be explored or illuminated that would have been difficult to verbalize, that to me is what a film should be. It's like trying to explain what a piece of music is like. You can't do it".

(Shane Carruth)

In “Upstream Color”, the protagonists are forced to live in a non-contaminated, “sterilized” environment and measure their existence based on the actual reality and the image of reality. The only connecting bridge between the two “realities” is “revealed” by the sound. As a result of this ongoing deconstructive process of actuality, Carruth leads one to wonder:

“How much are we dependent on our own emotions, our own perceptions… Do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world?”