Reservoir Docs has acquired documentary “The Other Fellow,” which is about several men named James Bond, like the movie’s hero. It has debuted the trailer (below).
The comedy-thriller premiered and won an award at Doc Edge New Zealand, and gets its European premiere in Dinard at the British Film Festival in France.
In Jamaica in 1952, author Ian Fleming needs a name for his suave, sophisticated secret agent, so he steals one from an unaware birdwatcher and creates a pop-culture phenomenon about the ultimate fictional alpha-male.
In 2022, the year of 007’s 60th anniversary onscreen, Australian filmmaker Matthew Bauer is on a global mission to discover the lasting, contrasting and very personal impacts of sharing such an identity with James Bond.
From a Swedish 007 super-fan with a World War II past, a gay New York theater director, an African American Bond accused of murder, and two resilient women caught up in it all, Bauer’s cinematic mission is “an audacious, poignant, and insightful examination of masculinity, gender, and race in the very real shadows of a movie icon,” Reservoir Docs said.
Bauer said: “What interested me was not so much that these men are named James Bond, but how the name connects them to a global media phenomenon – literally, emotionally, and especially digitally. The real plot of ‘The Other Fellow’ centers around the surprising ways its force pushes and pulls their lives in the most unexpected directions. And how it connects them together in ways you’d never anticipate.”
It is produced by Bauer and Michelle Brøndum, and edited by Lesley Posso. The music is composed by Alastair McNamara.
Brøndum said: “I have no doubt that the real human stories at the heart of this film will resonate with everyone who sees it.”
The team at Reservoir Docs has previously sold internationally “I Am Not Your Negro” and “The Black Power Mixtape.”
