Ne Plu Pikniko--No More Picnic

Trailer »

$5.95

An angst-filled temporary worker is plunged into the Corporate Inferno.

Joe Bob Briggs calls this award-winning short "the mother of all art films." An angst-filled temporary worker plunges into a symbolic labyrinth of mythological mayhem. In black and white and Esperanto with subtitles in English this avante gardesque film explores the existential dilemma as it lampoons the corporate culture of San Francisco's financial district. Ne Plu Pikniko won Best Satire Short at the NYIIFV Festival 2008 and is on to Cannes 2009. It also won second prize at The San Francisco Poetry Film Festival where it was called "redolent of Euripides." Also a second prize winner at the Rutgers Mixed Media Festival, reviewers noted it was "like Woody Allen interpreting Sartre" and "the film that got the greatest audience response."

Directed by

 

Written by

 

Produced by

 

Production Company

 

Cast

 

Director's Statement

Apart from creating a gritty ambiguously foreign underground look, I wanted to use the three streams of Esperanto language, the English subtitles and the surrealistic imagery to complement and contradict the metaphors of alienation. Esperanto was invented in 1877 and popularized in the 60's. Its intention was to overcomelanguage barriers to foster real understanding between all peoples on earth. While there are a few Native speakers--those born into an Esperanto-speaking family, in general, the Esperanto speaker does not carry with him or her a cultural identity, homeland, or history. He or she is always alien. Yet at the same time the language offers itself as a bridge between all other cultures and homelands. This was part of what inspired my decision to use Esperanto in the film, aside from its natural beauty and simplicity.

 

Filmmaker Biography

Joan Bechtel is an award-winning writer, comedian, actress and filmmaker from the San Francisco Bay Area known for her provocative social satire.

Bechtel’s short satiric film, Ne Plu Pikniko, in Esperanto with English subtitles, won second prize in the 1989 Rutgers Mixed Media Festival, and second place in the San Francisco Poetry in Film Festival 1989. Reviews called her work “redolent of Euripides,”—Poetry Film Review; “like Woody Allen interpreting a Sartre piece…the film that won the most audience reaction at the festival,”—Rutgers Mixed Media Festival; and “perhaps the mother of all art films,” —Joe Bob Briggs.

Joan’s work in short film and video includes the feminist satires Reel Independent Women and TeleVisionaries. Joan was also a co-writer on the feature film, Split, which became a cult hit in the U.S. and was featured at the Marriage of Art and Film Festival in Milan, Italy. Her work was given rave reviews by film reviewers and by Adrian Lyne, director of Fatal Attraction. For her role as Nurse Kygar in the horror feature, The Dead Pit, Joe Bob Briggs called her “the most diabolical woman in a white uniform since Nurse Ratchet.”

Bechtel recently co-authored Motherhood Confidential, a parenting anti-advice book reviewers have called “a book that goes where few have dared,” “unnervingly honest” and “an unflinching co-memoir.”