by FilmInk Staff
Anno 2020, the epic movie produced by Australian production entity MoneyShot Productions, premiered globally this week on YouTube, Rumble and other streaming platforms. This development follows last year’s sellout, red-carpet, cinema screenings of the film in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.
For Sydney-based producer Gil Ben-Moshe, Anno 2020 represents his first greenlit feature film; for New Zealand-Australian writer-director James Morcan, it represents his directorial debut “capping five long years of toil” to realise his dream.
As well as directing the movie, Morcan adapted the screenplay for it from his published novel of the same name.
Billed as a global kaleidoscope of interconnected characters seeking redemption, answers and justice amidst the chaos of 2020, the movie was shot against all odds in 17 countries on four continents in four different languages during the Covid-19 lockdowns of 2020-21.
“Anno 2020 is an indie, or independent, movie in the truest sense of the word,” said Morcan. “It was self-financed for a budget of only US$6,000, and is a pure indie, I promise you. We say controversial things in it that I assure you could never have been financed by anything within the mainstream movie industry.”
Morcan insists that “99.9% of films advertised as indie movies are non-indies” and dependent on the system.
“So-called ‘indie films’ often have stars or major distributors on board from the get-go, not to mention government finance. They often talk about ‘the difficulties of shooting indies on such a low budget’ then you find out they had millions or even tens of millions of dollars and were backed by a major corporation like Disney!
“The labels ‘indie’ and ‘independent’ were hijacked decades ago as major studios recognized those terms were being perceived as cool and audiences wanted more indies, or at least films sold as such, as they sensed artists had more creative freedoms in such films.
“However, if you go back in time, ‘indie’ originally meant completely independent and outside the ‘system’, as the word implies, and not beholden to anyone or anything, where rebellious, auteur-style directors could literally say whatever they wanted to without checking first with committees or government organizations or financiers or distributors.”
Morcan said as soon as he began writing the Anno 2020 screenplay, long before pre-production, he knew the film would get zero mainstream support and would have to be done as an old-fashioned indie against the odds.
“It was obvious that was going to be near impossible as we also had an epic story around the world with dialogue in different languages. Not to mention navigating shoots around the lockdowns and other Covid restrictions during 2020-21.
“Despite all the hardships filming this beast, never once did my team or I ever stop to ask, ‘Are we allowed to say that?’ or ‘Will we be offending anyone?’ or anything like that. Why? Because we were truly independent and so far outside the system that we might as well have been making the movie on the Moon!
“The end result is a film the likes of Hollywood or major production companies would never consider making.”
Early reviews for Anno 2020 signal that film critics resonate with this movie.
As director James Morcan says, “If you yearn for the return of actual indie movies, then you may like to check it out. It’s very suitable for family viewing.”
The movie has been meticulously subtitled for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing (HoH) as well as for numerous foreign language audiences.
Anno 2020 is free to view on YouTube
