ARTICLE 4: THE BEGINNING OF A JOURNEY

What is Mark’s short film Coven exactly? What is it all about?

With his own tools, like a dark black and white that reminds us of the panchromatic film era and reveals Coven’s economy, Mark relates the story of a drug addict and alcoholic who questions his life after an overdose. In his fight to heal, he joins a support group which turns out to be a demonic cult: thus the contrast in the image makes sense and emphasizes a simple tension between good and evil. This pitch seems to be similar to a B-movie but Coven shows the possibility of being totally independent. One morning, Mark’s obsession made him take his camera and start shooting in Milwaukee.

After seeing this strange but fascinating movie, which is naive and touching because there is an impression of instantness in Mark’s mise en scène that captivated us, we thought that, despite the language barrier, the time difference and the Atlantic ocean between us, Mark has something to teach, we just couldn't really define what yet. Thus, we contacted him. First, by phone: no response, just a few beeps that little by little disappeared in the receiver. Maybe our phone contract doesn't allow us to call the US but we tried.

We also sent him an email to get some answers about his idea of independence, how he managed to produce Coven as a pure independent, what he thinks about handmade distribution like he did with his short? Finally, what interested us the most was: what it meant to make a film exist on his terms.

Unfortunately, to this day, Mark never replied to our email. We will wait for an answer.

So we decided to write him a letter, like in the good old days.

But we were afraid to become too old-fashioned so we ended up throwing it into the bin.

Since we didn't get news from Mark, we were convinced that the Cannes Film Festival could be the perfect place to find a reflection on film circulation: this obsession (the same that led us to write to Mark) made us go on the first bus to Cannes.

Also, being in Cannes was a way to find an echo of Mark, in the films, in the conversations and in all the festival was saying about genre cinema in 2026.

Once we arrived at the festival, we walked and wandered a lot, trying desperately to find someone who would know Mark, any of his friends or even the director of American Movie.

We asked unknown people and celebrities about our idol but nobody seemed to know him.

On Friday May 14th, we woke up on a yacht, burnt by the sun and hit by the hangover. When Scarlett Johansson asked if we had a Doliprane 500, we realized the truth: what we were looking for could not be found in the glitters: we had enough red carpet and Palme d'Or whispers. What we were looking for was not here. It was somewhere in Wisconsin, in a truck full of VHS tapes.