Hal Hartley hasn’t released a feature since 2006’s strange spy thriller satire-cum-Henry Fool sequel, Fay Grim, and in the interim he’s primarily busied himself with smaller projects such as shorts and privately grousing that someone else made a movie called Trust and it was fucking David Schwimmer. (Probably. We would.) But he’s also been hard at work on a longer film called Meanwhile, a story that Hartley initially envisioned as an hour-long “featurette” similar to earlier efforts like Surviving Desire and The Book Of Life, and which somewhere along the way turned into a prospective pilot for a miniseries.
Unfortunately, although it initially attracted some interest, in Hartley’s words “it seems Meanwhile (the series) just isn't what the television industry requires at the moment,” leading him to turn to more grassroots means to see it distributed. Hartley has now set up a Kickstarter campaign where you can pre-order Meanwhile on limited-edition DVD, while at the same time contributing to the cost of finishing it. Those who donate up to $1,000 or more, of course, get all sorts of extras—up to and including being listed as a co-producer on the project in both the credits and advertising, which gets you into both the film’s premiere screening in New York as well as its after-party. Who knows what goes down at a Hal Hartley after-party? Something droll, no doubt.
Here’s a video in which Meanwhile star—and longtime Hartley collaborator—explains both the movie and the campaign. It features partial nudity!