BROOK LEE KARNER CLASSIFICATION: DIGITAL UTILITY/WESTERN REGIONS YEARS IN GUILD: 1 HOME BASE: LOS ANGELES FILM: THE COOP GEAR: RED EPIC WEAPON, SCHNEIDER-KREUZNACH XENON LENSES
“It’s nice to feel seen at this burgeoning stage of my career, when I often wonder and sometimes doubt myself. This recognition is the reassurance that I’ve put in the work and I’m on the right path. Being an ECA honoree inspires me to rise to the challenge and relinquish any fear of failure.”
The Coop tells the story of a troubled vagabond named Santiago who picks up work as a farmhand on a chicken ranch run by drug-dealing ravers. The protagonist deeply sympathizes with the animals bred for slaughter and absconds behind a camera to break free from his fears and anxieties. Karner is most proud of capturing a spontaneous rooster fight. “It could not be replicated; it was all by luck and spectacular chance,” the Miami native recalls. “We were walking around to collect random shots the protagonist would have shot when [writer/ director] Rita Al Cunha excitedly pointed out the free-roaming roosters getting fluffed up in the middle of the field. We were almost out of film, too!” “It’s more about a feeling than anything else,” Karner asserts. “It’s like the melancholy you feel on a Sunday before the week starts or grieving before you’ve even experienced any significant loss.” But it’s not a downer. The film concludes hopefully with a reminder that moments of inexplicable beauty make life meaningful. “Usually, loss of some sort signifies our purpose in life and, ironically, purpose supplies us with a sense of happiness. At the end of the day, we are all on a quest to find beauty and meaning in the mundane,” says Karner, who studied philosophy at Florida International University. After taking a “philosophy of film” class, he was convinced that photography was “a perfect medium for a philosopher to work with, and I started to see myself as a man with a movie camera.”
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SEPTEMBER 2023