Split Tooth Media is excited to host the online premiere of a new short film by director Christopher Bell 

Many of Christopher Jason Bell’s short films, such as Trammel (2020) and One Times One (2016), follow immigrants in America and the relationships they forge that help them feel at home in a new country. Boundaries, a new short film that Split Tooth Media is excited to premiere online, finds Bell looking at the immigrant experience in America from a different angle. 

The opening shot is an ominous slow-motion pan of a door with multiple locks that suggests something sinister is on the other side. What we see are two men (Frank Mosley and Matthew Shaw) in an empty office building. At its core, Boundaries is about the men discussing the best layout for an indoor detention center, but it leaves the darker aspects of the project hidden in plain sight. 

Though its small cast and shots from afar may make it feel like it was made during the pandemic, Bell began writing the film around 2014 and completed it in 2018. It has only grown more relevant since its creation.

Watch Boundaries here, and read a brief interview with Christopher Bell about making the film. 

Boundaries from Christopher Bell on Vimeo.

Split Tooth Media: When did you first start forming the ideas for Boundaries?

Christopher Bell: Around the time of conception — maybe 2014 or 2015 — I was thinking more about systems: their creation and their design. How in our everyday life like the roads on our commute to work or even the way we acquire things in order to continue living, were not just always here — they were created and designed in a specific way to be used in a specific way, and how those who made them came from a particular ideology and perspective. It sounds simple (stupid, even!) — of course these things did not appear out of thin air — but they’re also very easy to take for granted.

I was also thinking about prisons, detention centers, jails, and so on. Who designs these and why? Who are they for, and does that matter? What is their purpose? When considering these questions I wonder what the long-term *goal* is, if there is even one. 

So this led me to the idea of making a movie where people are creating a jail of some sort, devoid of any very specific context as to who they are for. Just the mundane work, very minimalistic so it would draw particular attention to how nonchalant the people were who were doing this work, and so that the few lines of conversation between them would then be able to be thought about. What they are talking about and why, what allows them to do that? And the minimalism would make things feel eerie and even sort of sci-fi, but I also wanted to keep things contemporary — placing the movie within a space that was clearly used for something else at some point, and having some form of life and people going about their life in the nearby vicinity. The idea, too, was to make the contradictions stick out, because it is something that people need to come to terms with.

The film mostly takes place within two long takes. What led you to establish that minimalist aesthetic?

I thought the two wide shots supported the idea that the people making these decisions and constructing these things are hidden, unaccountable, inaccessible, etc. — we don’t know who they are, they are just some people in a room that make things happen and we can’t know them and they like it that way. The distance hopefully achieves some sort of Brechtian alienation where the viewer would ask why they are doing this, why people do this at all, and what can/should be done.

You’ve cast Frank Mosley in multiple films. How did you start working with him and when did you bring him on for Boundaries? 

Frank and I go back a few years when I was screening my first feature The Winds That Scatter (2015). We bonded because we were both filmmakers with very little resources working as much as we could in a similar fashion — experimenting and being as productive as possible, and also screening our work anywhere we could. And struggling to get the word out! So we hit it off and Frank is also a very talented performer, so it made sense to do a few projects together.

Once I figured out who and what the film was going to be about, I was already thinking about both Frank and Matt [Shaw] for the casting. Matt I knew would get the vibe for the contractor — a kind of Mike Rowe type who would be wearing the costume of working-class salt-of-the-earth guy, but who is a well-off boss/owner. Frank in the same way would get a more upscale kind of “boss” guy, but one who would not only be able to access what he sees as some sort of creativity (here’s my vision — the prison walls go here, the people here, the guards here, etc) while also justifying everything by keeping it in his mind that he was doing everything for his family. 

Many of your other films have been about characters who are immigrants, often struggling economically and/or socially in America. This film, however, while never making it explicit that the detention center is being constructed for immigrants, places its focus on the systemic forces that threaten and cause incredible strife for immigrants. What interested you in shifting your focus towards characters on the other side of that experience?

It’s really, really difficult, at least for me, to figure out other ways to tell a story that aren’t based on a single or a few characters’ journey. When you know that there are structural forces in the world and systems at play, how do you make a narrative film about that? It’s a ceiling that’s hard for me to break through sometimes, especially when thinking of a feature film. For short films I felt like you could probably do this kind of thing a bit easier than you would a feature: audiences would stick around for it to see what you’re doing maybe because of the short time commitment. All of these ideas I tried to explore in the film are in my head a lot, and honestly, it wasn’t really something I had seen before in a film — and if I’m wrong, that’s fine! But it wasn’t something I was seeing tackled a lot in this specific way.

Find more films from Christopher Bell on Vimeo
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