"Dimmer," the 2004 short documentary about a gang of visually impaired teens, will air on the Sundance Channel Nov. 30.The film appeared at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival. The Sundance Channel Web site says, "Talmage Cooley's award-winning documentary short film presents a poignant and memorable snapshot of life within a gang of sight-impaired teenage boys who create their own world among the abandoned factories of Buffalo's rust belt."
Here's a profile of director Talmage Cooley, which discusses "Dimmer," from Nerve.com:
The idea of kids wreaking havoc in Buffalo, New York, hardly raises an eyebrow. But blind kids wreaking havoc — now that's interesting. Or so thought Talmage Cooley, who heard rumors about a blind gang of teenage criminals and made them the basis of a two-sentence music video pitch for Interpol. The band was intrigued, and soon the L.A.-based filmmaker was on a plane headed east to the outskirts of the blighted city. He spent three days searching for the gang's leader, who had recently been arrested for riding a dirt bike in a field. The result — which won't be airing on TRL anytime soon — was a short documentary titled Dimmer.
Cooley first gained notoriety at Sundance 2004 with his short comedy Pol Pot's Birthday, which chronicles an imagined surprise party thrown for the grim Cambodian leader. Filmmaking is an unlikely career choice for the West Virginia
native, a former Morgan Stanley bond trader with an MBA. (His resume does include co-writing, with Andy Spade, Public Love, a photo-driven account of sex in public places.) Cooley taught himself film production by taking night classes in New York City; he made Pol Pot’s Birthday in part to experiment with comedy. "When you make somebody laugh," he explains, "they trust you."
Humor returns in Dimmer, which is powerful because the kids have such a wry take on their situation. Indeed, Cooley says he gradually realized his film wasn't about blind kids behaving badly. "The story is about all the things that go into being any teenager," he says. "Rebellion, isolation, longing, frustration."
These themes resonate most for the main subject, Mike, who breaks up with his girlfriend halfway through the film because she's been cheating on him. To purge his misery, he and a friend whale on empty barrels with sticks in a vast, abandoned steel factory. The hollow, ringing cacophony perfectly embodies teen angst, as does the image of the kids, dwarfed by the gaping architecture of ruin. Before long, though, Mike's back to normal, riding his bike along a bumpy sidewalk with his friend on the back. Musing on his unfaithful ex, he says, "I'm blind, so I don't judge people by looks, but that bitch was ugly, dude."
