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Overlooked & Underrated Docs & Features
(click on broll or dschwartz for all his posts)
Inside Out: The People’s Art Project
Directed by Alistair Siddons, HBO documentary “Inside Out” tells the story of JR and his art project which went global and got him on stage at TED, presenting there as the 2011 winner of the TED Prize.
JR began his career as a graffiti artist in Paris. He spontaneously started taking pictures of people, printing them out enlarged, and pasting them up in. He turned this penchant of expression into the Inside Out Project.
People around the world would send him photographic portraits of themselves – framed as head shots. There are two restrictions to submissions: There must be no logos, and no messages of hate.
Inside Out enlarges, prints and ships the portraits back to the submitter for them to paste up “in a place with meaning.” More than 130,000 people have submitted portraits. Prints have been pasted in more than 10,000 locations, in more than 100 countries. Having gone global, there are now Inside Out ‘photo booths’ and ‘photo trucks’ around the globe obviating the need to send photographs to Paris.
Starting with portions of JR’s TED presentation, Siddons follows our hero in his Paris studio and on journeys to Haiti, North Dakota, the West Bank, and Tunisia. He tells a story both charming and disturbing… and fun.