Director's Collaboration

If you had walked into the Atlanta based Highlands video store Movies Worth Seeing in 2004, chances are filmmakers Gideon Kennedy or Marcus Rosentrater would have been your helpful clerk, organizing titles or studying their future career on the countertop T.V.

It was here, in fact, in Anne and Jerry Rubenstein’s decades-old neighborhood institution, where the two met each other, forming a collaboration that has produced three short films, six commercials, three special event videos, and one music video under their production company, Climenole LLC. Their works have played in over 30 cities worldwide and have won several awards.

The two began work on “Clandestine” in 2005, after first being given the idea by another Atlanta filmmaker, Matthew Owensby, then a video store clerk at that other Highlands film hub Videodrome. Before “Clandestine” would be completed, Kennedy and Rosentrater finished another short film, six commercials and a music video. But, in March of 2009 an inquiry about the project from the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) would crack the whip. The two would race to have the film completed in time for its world premiere at IDFA, the world’s largest documentary film festival, in November of 2009.

Since then, “Clandestine” has shown at the Cinequest Film Festival in California, the Thin Line Film Festival in Texas, the Black Maria Film + Video Festival, where it received a Jury Prize (1st Prize), the South Alabama Film Festival, the Indie Grits Film Festival in South Carolina, the Atlanta Film Festival, and is due to play in Spain as part of the Huesca Film Festival.