Revolution Selfe expands the horizons of documentary storytelling while broadening our understanding about the lesser-known fronts in the global “War on Terror.” Filmmaker Steven De Castro paints a portrait of a 48 year-old Maoist guerilla army in the Philippine hinterlands known as the New People’s Army. But rather than simply presenting interviews and images in a traditional journalistic manner, this flm weaves fantasy elements and web-based camera techniques into the documentary form to disrupt our entire matrix of widely held beliefs underpinning the discussion of terrorism, poverty, and the motivations of the warriors who fght in a peasant revolution. The flm is narrated and shot almost entirely from frstperson point of view, using a small GoPro action camera that the flmmaker is wearing. Because of this unique shooting angle, the flm succeeds at times in giving the audience an almost video game-like immersion in the narrator’s experience.

“Revolution Selfe tells its story, not through interviews and b-roll, but through the creation of the lived experience of being there. The flm borrows augmented reality techniques from video games and youtube videos, as if to say that the visual language of mainstream documentaries is incapable of communicating the struggles of those who live beyond the margins of globalism and technology – the world’s downtrodden agrarian poor.” -Natalie Selincourt, Wish Machinery

REVOLUTION SELFIE was developed with the assistance of the prestigious Works-in-Progress Lab at DCTV in New York. Steven De Castro is a New York director, teacher, and cinematographer. Before he became a filmmaker, De Castro was a trial lawyer and served as Human Rights Commissioner of Jersey City.