NOWNESS have launched an open call for their Shorts on Sunday series — which premieres experimental work from emerging filmmakers — and paired the announcement with Waterpark, the directorial debut from cinematographer Evan Prosofsky, whose previous credits include music videos by Grizzly Bear, Bat For Lashes, Grimes, and Toro y Moi. The nearly 17-minute short offers a meditative look at World Waterpark, one of the world’s largest indoor water attractions (which also happens to be located inside the largest shopping mall in North America: Alberta, Canada’s West Edmonton Mall), and features a score composed by experimental soundman Alex Zhang Hungtai, a.k.a. Dirty Beaches.
Prosofsky’s Waterpark drifts at a slow pace — more lazy river inner-tube lounge than high-speed water slide death-drop — and Dirty Beaches’ blinking, ambient soundtrack lends the piece an alien quality; something as common as mundane as watching a girl eat French fries at a mall food court suddenly feels like a clinical look at convenience and consumerism in the lonesome, crowded West.
