I-Be Area

Director: Ryan Trecartin

2007 / 108min / DCP

An early interpreter and poet of the new incoherency of the Digital Age, Trecartin—working with an ensemble cast of friends—plays no less than five roles in the carnivalesque, anarchic I-Be Area, his multi-layered first feature-length work, which revolves around goings-on in “Jaime’s Area,” something like an internet community site imagined as a real physical space, filled with nattering noise, crosstalk, and insistent exhibitionism. A particolored fantasy that has become our exhilarating, awful reality.

“Ryan Trecartin is, perhaps not intentionally, the leader of contemporary cyber queer style. I-Be Area was a shock to everyone’s aesthetic system when it was released. Fashion has not been the same since.”—K8 Hardy