Imaginary Friends

Imaginary Friends is a documentary and a performance, which invites the audience to watch a documentary film during its post-production phase with live addition of sound effects in a Foley* studio. It is a reflection on what cinema can become while exploiting an effect most widely used for construction of believable illusions.

The film aims at disillusioning its viewers, preventing them from forgetting the unreality and the tricks used to create the magic of cinema, to make them believe that all is true.

The amateur film-maker and three Foley artists make a score out of the film. While the performers are obsessively seeking to literally reproduce the noises produced by objects and beings in the film, instead they are unmaking the illusion, uncovering the mechanisms used to create a lie. The director uses the opportunity to play with possibilities, experimenting with narratives that range from the visual world of small and playful stories to the narrative world created through comments of a restless producer.

The nature of images and sounds is based on a collection of documentary and fictional notes contrasting the images created by the documentary and by the performance. As if in a neo-cubist space the truth is freed from an unreflecting perception, opening the way to invoking spirits – the imaginary friends.

* Foley is a process of creating sound effects recorded in a Foley studio, where sounds of steps, closing doors, thunderclaps etc. are reproduced by sound designers alongside the film with the purpose of making the scenes appear more realistic.