INDIANAPOLIS — We’ve all been there. Driving down the interstate, we pass another car and glance over. Who are those people? Where are they going? What are they talking about?
It was this curiosity that led filmmaker Charlie Borowicz to begin a photography project that took him from the highways of Indiana to Indianapolis International Airport.
Cars enclose passengers in a private bubble, he explained, and when we pass them on the road, we get a momentary glimpse into that private space which is really right out in public.
A one-minute film based on that simple premise — “Road Portraits” — loops several times an hour on a large screen above the baggage claim area at the airport. Visible from both the first and second floors, it will be featured through May. The video project at Indianapolis International Airport is part of a partnership between the Indianapolis Airport Authority and the Arts Council of Indianapolis.
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“They are enacting small dramas very earnestly and honestly,” Borowicz said of the clips making up the film.
“It’s an exciting time to be a filmmaker,” Borowicz said. “It’s changed so much.”
Borowicz recalls his years as a student at Mt. Vernon High School, when he first got into movie-making. All his movies were shot in analogue using a VHS video camera. He then edited them on a VHS-to-VHS deck.
Following high school, Borowicz went to Ball State and earned an undergraduate degree in photography. He learned to use a dark room and develop his own film.
In 2002, Charlie, his wife, Trisha, and his best friend Barnaby Aaron — both Mt. Vernon High School grads — started AnC (pronounced “ahnk”) Movies to write and produced short narrative and documentary films.
Borowicz and his team grew up as the technology grew.
“I’ve grown up with the technological leap that’s happened in video,” Borowicz said.
Film-making has changed radically over the past two decades, Borowicz explains. It’s no longer necessary to shoot thousands of feet of film, send it off for processing and wait weeks for it to come back to see what you shot. It can all be done right at home.
The group’s largest project to date was a full-length documentary called “Science, Sex and the Ladies,” which started as an idea from Borowicz’s wife, an active partner in the film-making trio. She did the research and presented it to the group.
“We all got on board and developed the script from there,” Borowicz said.
The film, begun in 2009, took four years and $40,000 to make.
“Science, Sex and the Ladies” is a frank but irreverent documentary. Through humorous looks at anatomy, history and culture, the film discusses how culturally misunderstanding female sexual response has resulted in a broken sexuality for men and women and what we need to understand in order for that to change.
The film has won numerous awards including “Best Documentary” and “Best Director” at the Imaginarium Film Festival and documentary feature award at the Minneapolis Underground Film Festival in 2014. Currently, the hour-and-20-minute film is available on pay per view at Vimeo and Amazon on Demand.
Some of the group’s more recent projects include a short documentary with Rock Steady Boxing called “Fighting Parkinson’s”; a macabre retelling of the Hansel and Gretel story for the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art; and under the name of CBruv, Borowicz has created a number of music videos and films for local dance companies.
As for “Road Portraits,” Borowicz likens it to Indiana’s Midwestern status as a flyover state.
“What is the beauty of here?” he asked. “Whether a flyover state or a drive-by state, one of the things we do have culturally is cars, roads. If you go somewhere, you gotta drive. People think the Midwest isn’t an interesting place. It is. Life is what you make of it.”
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Charles Borowicz co-founded AnC Movies in 2002, along with Barnaby Aaron and wife Trisha to write and produce short narrative and documentary films. Simultaneously, he has evolved his personal film experiments around his fascination with everyday reality. Borowicz’s work has been screened at festivals nationwide including at the Black Point Film Festival, the Frederick (Maryland) Film Festival and at Gateway Film Center’s Documentary Week. Locally, his work has been seen at Ruckus Makerspace, iMOCA and Indy Pride as well as online. He graduated from Mt. Vernon High School and lives and works in Indianapolis.
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