PICTURE CHARACTER explores the complex, conflict-prone, and often hilarious world of the creators, lovers, and arbiters of emoji, our world’s newest pictorial language.
SYNOPSIS
PICTURE CHARACTER explores the complex, conflict-prone, and often hilarious world of the creators, lovers, and arbiters of emoji, our world’s newest pictorial language. How do you create a global language on the fly? This film charts the evolution of emoji and investigates what they may reveal about our increasingly technological world.
ABOUT FILMMAKER(S)
Martha Shane
Martha Shane is an Emmy-award-winning documentary filmmaker. Her directorial debut After Tiller premiered in the U.S. Documentary Competition at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival and won the Emmy for Best Documentary. Theatrically released by Oscilloscope Laboratories, After Tiller was broadcast on the renowned PBS documentary series POV. Most recently, Martha produced and co-wrote the award-winning documentary From This Day Forward, which was theatrically released by Argot Pictures and also broadcast on POV. Previously, Martha produced the feature documentary Bi the Way, which had its premiere at the SXSW Film Festival and was broadcast on MTV’s LOGO channel. In addition to directing and producing, Martha is an editor whose credits include 11/8/16 (The Orchard, Netflix, 2017), ACORN and the Firestorm (Independent Lens, 2018), and Personal Statement (AFI Docs, PBS World Channel, 2018).
Ian Cheney is an Emmy-nominated and Peabody Award-winning documentary filmmaker. He grew up in New England and received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Yale University. After graduate school, Ian co-created, co-produced and starred in the feature documentary King Corn, which aired on PBS and was awarded a George Foster Peabody Award in 2009. Ian subsequently directed the feature documentary The Greening of Southie, featured in The New Yorker and on Good Morning America; Truck Farm, the story of urban agriculture in New York City; The City Dark, a feature documentary about light pollution and the disappearing night; The Search for General Tso, a feature documentary about American Chinese food; Bluespace, which explores the terraforming of Mars and the waterways of New York City; and The Smog of the Sea, a collaboration with musician Jack Johnson about microplastics in the sea. His most recent film, The Most Unknown, is a feature documentary profiling nine scientists working on the fringes of human knowledge, released theatrically by Abramorama and available worldwide on Netflix.
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