Independent Lens
If Dreams Were Lightning: Rural Healthcare Crisis
If Dreams Were Lightning: Rural Healthcare Crisis explores the lives of people living in the rural South with limited or no access to healthcare.
Plastic Bag
Struggling with its immortality, a discarded plastic bag (voiced by Werner Herzog) ventures through the environmentally barren remains of America as it searches for its maker.
- Series
- FUTURESTATES
- Premiere Date
- March 5, 2010
- Length
- 19 minutes
- Funding Initiative
- Short-Form Series and Special Projects
Director
Ramin Bahrani
Academy Award, BAFTA, WGA and Emmy nominee Ramin Bahrani is the Iranian-American filmmaker of Man Push Cart, Chop Shop, 99 Homes and The White Tiger. A Guggenheim Fellowship winner, his debut feature doc 2nd Chance premiered at Sundance and was released by Showtime. In 2010, Roger Ebert proclaimed Bahrani as “the director of the decade.”
- Other ITVS Films
- Goodbye Solo
- If Dreams Were Lightning: Rural Healthcare Crisis
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The Film
This short film by American director Ramin Bahrani (Goodbye Solo) traces the epic, existential journey of a plastic bag (voiced by Werner Herzog) searching for its lost maker, the woman who took it home from the store and eventually discarded it. Along the way, it encounters strange creatures, experiences love in the sky, grieves the loss of its beloved maker, and tries to grasp its purpose in the world.
In the end, the wayward plastic bag wafts its way to the ocean, into the tides, and out into the Pacific Ocean trash vortex — a promised nirvana where it will settle among its own kind and gradually let the memories of its maker slip away.
