Industry delegates sent a clear message to the filmmakers behind “Nothing But the Truth about Extraterrestrials”: We want to believe.
A non-fiction dive into the latest science behind little green men, the multilingual doc proved quite a hot item at this year’s Venice Production Bridge gap-financing market, fielding three bids for distribution, another three co-production offers, and an invitation to screen as a work-in-progress from a leading international festival, “Extraterrestrials” co-director Eric Ruel told Variety.
Longtime creative partners Ruel and Guylaine Maroist are co-directing and producing through their joint La Ruelle Films banner, which recently scored a sizeable non-fiction hit with the social doc “Backlash: Misogyny in the Digital Age.” After tackling political spectacle with 2014’s satirical “God Save Justin Trudeau,” and online malaise with “Backlash,” the filmmakers now look to the stars for a so-called “cinema verité meets sci-fi” exposé on the state of the alien unknown.
“We want this to be a cinematic and philosophical journey,” says Ruel. “We want to question the existence of extraterrestrials and to question our perception of the world, because it’s getting all the more difficult to know what’s true and what’s false these days. So we’re going to get to the bottom of it.”
When researching another project, Ruel and Maroist made the surprising discovery that nearly all the scientists interviewed – including several eminent academics from the world’s most august institutions – shared a belief in extraterrestrial visitations, thus planting a new question in the filmmaker’s minds: What do those scientists know that we don’t?
Forgoing interviews, graphics, or talking heads, this direct cinema investigation will follow the field’s leading academics, scientists, adventurers, debunkers and ironclad believers as they all twist around this alien topic. Alongside astrophysicists and astrobiologists, the film was also embed with political scientists, government agents and psychologists, exploring the subject and the latest developments in ufology from every angle.
“We don’t fully know what we’ll find,“ says Ruel. “But one thing is for sure: Reality is no doubt stranger than fiction.”
