A family's home movies document a desperate crime spree and the bid to outrun the consequences. Born from a colossal trove of innocuous uploads to YouTube, Fraud is an impressionistic meta-fiction thriller that reveals one family's struggle for the American Dream and the mutability of the stories we tell online.
Canada
Hot Docs International Film Festival
Canada
a fifty-two-minute slide down Occam's Razor for someone who, like me, goes in with only a rough idea of the construct and narrative, spending the entire runtime wondering if Fleischer-Camp really found a family who, if they didn't actually upload videos of a path of criminal activity onto the internet, uploaded something that really looks like it (shouts to Memory for uploading a video explaining exactly how they did it, proving this not only a triumph of Final Cut organization but eye for detail in not allowing any footage from gathered videos to betray the 2012 setting into the timeline). but it's the moments of truth that Fleischer-Camp finds that really support this narrative; small moments with the kids and their songs, the (very) frequent zooms at the wife's butt, the (utterly wrenching and, in the context into which it's edited, infuriating) scene of letting the rabbit go into the wild. it gets better the more I reflect on it.
The fake Youtube cutup formal gimmick is suitably impressive but it's in service of another timid swipe at capitalism and "we live in public" social media stuff. Still neat.
The story is that director Dean Fleischer-Camp found this family's home videos on YouTube and edited them together into a crime story. It's a story that I have some trouble believing- what kind of maniac films himself standing in line at AutoZone or reading junk mail? But apparently Gary Arnold, the guy who originally filmed and uploaded these videos, is a real person who has given interviews. So maybe he really is some sort of modern day Samuel Pepys.
Fraud is frenetic and low-fi. The visuals frequently distort; there's excessive zoom; and sometimes we can't hear anything other than the wind in the cheap, built-in microphone. Right about the time I got used to the rapid cutting, I started to…
Totally fascinating. But unfortunately it's the kind of thing that really needs a Q&A to fully appreciate. Not sure how it'll play for someone on a laptop without context.
“Where's my money? Where did it go?”
Maybe if The Blair Witch Project people had kids and were scammers.
This film quite literally bends reality at it's whim to write darker sinister narrative. A masterwork of editing and foolery. A true found footage film. The ultimate Kuleshov Effect. A big hoax. One of the best experimental films I've ever seen.
Never has a movie title been more apt than Fraud; stitched together from over 100+ hours of home video, Dean Fleischer-Camp creates a meta-narrative of a family on the run. What you're seeing is real, but it's not what you think, it's what Fleischer-Camp wants you to think.
I quite liked the dizzying camerawork, random video artifacts, and abrupt editing. Plus, it makes me think of that Office episode where Jim takes excerpts from Jo Bennett's book on tape, and edits it down to make it sound like she's insulting Gabe; good stuff.
However, the fact that this isn't really a documentary doesn't excuse releasing your pet rabbit into the wild. Also, wearing Ed Hardy and liking Ted Nugent kinda makes you an asshole; sorry, I don't make the rules.
the man film the family
This is the best youtube poop I've ever seen.
Why they react to things like they were Sims characters?
Fraud, or Late Stage Capitalism: A Love Story. An inventive and deliriously deceptive found footage "documentary" about an American family simultaneously fueled and beaten down by Capitalism, that's also about the inherent artifice to documentary filmmaking and home videos. Dean Fleischer-Camp, who co-created the terrific Marcel the Shell with Jenny Slate, weaves a harrowing tale of insurance fraud, crime, deception, and familial strain out of hours and hours of seemingly innocuous footage uploaded to YouTube.
Fleischer-Camp and his editor Jonathan Rippon manipulate this footage to tell the story they want to tell. In the film, Hurricane Sandy occurs a month and a half before it actually does, hairstyles change drastically day-to-day, and it dumps feet of snow in Montreal in…
Fraud is an impressionistic theorietical deconstruction of digital cinema's involvement with an online age, as well as a reinterpretation of THE "Documentary's" position within the spectrum of genre. To begin, this is a film entirely made of footage gathered through a variety of Youtube channels. Through manipulation and devious imagination, an innocent middle-american family is incriminated in Insurance fraud as we witness their escape to Canada. Immediately the commentary is present, looking upon this interconnected web we've made for ourselves, with dangerous implications of endless possibilities. With such a replicable aesthetic, digital photography is challenged in its legitimacy, relating to the theories of Lev Manovich. Film was created as a capsule of the truth, yet digital filmmaking has fundamentally obscured…
