The Outside World

Even at the Brunswick Underground Film Festival, Terry Chiu's Open Doom Crescendo was an outlier.

“TO THE LEGIT OUTSIDERS/WHEREVER YOU REALLY ARE,” reads the dedication in both English and Traditional Chinese at the start of Terry Chiu’s almost three-hour Open Doom Crescendo, easily the most singular, exhilarating and taxing of the varied provocations I sampled at last week’s inaugural Brunswick Underground Film Festival. “Underground” is a word open to interpretation, perhaps more so than ever before. But few would dispute that it applies to this microbudget blend of sci-fi action movie and philosophical satire, set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland where the survivors of a drawn-out war continue to do battle while either seeking or evading the enigmatic Embodiment of Angst.

More contentiously, the film has also been described as “outsider art”: as the quote above indicates, Chiu retains an ambivalence about the label, which he’s taken on board more out of necessity than choice. “I don’t know anyone else who uses the term ‘outsider art’ for film,” he has said, meaning his fellow filmmakers, “because that means they’re like already banishing themselves into a spot where a lot of people won’t see what you do.”