CHARLIE VICTOR ROMEO American Independents

With text taken solely from transcripts of real black box recordings, CHARLIE VICTOR ROMEO employs both stark theatricality and 3-D photography to insert the audience into the experience of aviation disasters. The film, which takes its title from phonetic aviation slang for Cockpit Voice Recorder, is a “performance documentary,” created and reenacted by members of New York’s Collective: Unconscious Theater. Since 1999, the cast and crew of CVR have toured the world – telling the story of six doomed flights on the barest of sets with a repertory cast of seven actors. By retaining the simplicity of the play’s staging while introducing state-of-the-art stereoscopic cinematography, co-directors Robert Berger, Patrick Daniels and Karlyn Michelson have created a cinematic paradox of scale – effectively trapping viewers within a literal black box and allowing them to bear witness to sudden and lethal events as they play out just inches from their seats.