DIRECTORS STATEMENT.

Ten years ago I watched the biggest fundamental shift in film history happening before my eyes. As a film maker and a projectionist, I felt helpless as cinemas everywhere tore out the familiar purring heartbeats of their auditoriums to make way for the digital promise of a projectionist free future. For me, digital projection wasn’t remotely the same experience and I couldn’t help but feel we were losing something important. So I grabbed a camera and started documenting what I thought was the end of an era.

The projectionist community is a small, but tight-knit network where word spread quickly of my project and before I knew it, I’d fallen deep into a rabbit hole of secret print collections, equipment hoarders and stories of lives lived for the movies.

I’d tapped into something extraordinary. This was pure documentary film making; allowing the content to reveal the story, moulded without constraint of time or deadline. 
Renowned Australian Cinematographer, Joanne Donahoe-Beckwith joined me on my quest and together we spent the next eight years exploring the secret community’s and organisations that were saving the movies. We uncovered missing scenes from Stanley Kramers, On the Beach in a corrugated iron shed in Melbourne’s West. We travelled to the U.K. to see 3 strip Cinerama being projected and to the U.S. where we visited the Hollywood Dome and spoke to film luminaries like Leonard Maltin and Douglas Trumbull. Each successive interview and locale taking us deeper into an incredible community of people with a shared passion for film. 

Then the turning point for both the survival of film and the arc of the documentary presented itself in the announcement that Quentin Tarantino would shoot and release his eighth feature on 70mm film. It was a dream come true for me; not to mention a massive projection challenge but one that did provide the final missing piece for the documentary. For the first time in my thirty year career as a film maker, I stepped in front of the camera for what became a truly unexpected moment, defining the pure joy that is projected film.

Over a decade Splice Here: A Projected Odyssey has evolved into a fully formed international journey of projected loss, passion and revival. I want audiences to meet these people and celebrate their love for the glorious world of film that once was and maybe still can be… for at least a little bit longer.

Rob (Bert) Murphy