Makeshift director Steve Sale‘s debut film Superhero Me took this year’s onedotzero ‘adventures in motion festival’ into the realms of the domestic – the very domestic. In his DIY documentary Sale takes the law into his own rubber-gloved hands as he scours the globe (mostly via the world wide web) in a hilarious attempt to make a bona-fide superhero (as well as a bit of an ass) of himself. The criteria are as follows: look good in spandex; learn self-defence; get a costume; a secret lair, some gadgets and a vehicle.
Sale invents superhero alter ego ‘SOS’, with a sidekick and catchy theme tune to boot. Along the way he encounters other self-made superheroes, including Angle Grinder Man whose sole arch nemesis is the regulation parking-clamp. Sale then goes where no man has ever gone before as, dressed head to toe in spandex, he rides a red chopper to fight evil on the streets of Sutton and Epsom. As far as superhero feats go, SOS makes an exhausted citizen’s arrest on a juvenile shoplifter and cheers up a few drunks one Friday night. But it’s Sale’s disarming wit and silliness that’ll make you want to see him save the day, or at least quit his day job.
In the Q&A following the film, Sale revealed that the documentary was made on a super small budget of around £1000. This is not at all hard to believe, he shoots on any format to hand and his cameraman is often his girlfriend. Moreover this is what the film is all about – it’s an all strings shown documentary that doesn’t try to be anything else.
Once he has refined his own superhero persona, Sale travels across the Atlantic to meet Florida’s own registered superhero Master Legend. Although, aesthetically, Legend is more Penguin-era DeVito than Christian Bale, he is the lone crusader fighting crime on the streets; he’s the real deal. As Sale begins to take a closer look at the man behind the mask Superhero Me, like the best documentaries, finds itself in unexpected territory. At the heart of Sale’s film is a boyish dream, but as the grim realities of real life crime and injustice prevail he gives us something to really think about.
Having just returned from Transylvania to get to the bottom of all this vampire nonsense, we hope that Sale’s career in the botch-job documentary filmmaking industry is to be continued….
For more information about onedotzero 2010 visit onedotzero.com and watch Superhero Me now at Projector.tv
Superhero Me At Onedotzero 2010 (text) by Zara Miller is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
