Quantum Cowboys

Rez Film Club is presented by the Native Circle Advisory Board at Circle Cinema and proudly sponsored by the Flint Family Foundation and Cherokee Film. This month, Rez Film Club presents Quantum Cowboys, a wild mind-bending sci-fi western from director Geoff Marslett and Executive Producers Lily Gladstone, Kiowa Gordon, and David Arquette!

All admission to Rez Film Club events are FREE and open to the public, plus one FREE small popcorn for each person! Before the film, there will be trivia with prizes hosted by Native Circle.

About the film: 1h39min - Animation, Western, Sci-Fi - Not Rated - English

Quantum Cowboys is an old fashioned western about two haplessly charming drifters, Frank and Bruno, who team up with Linde, recover her land and trek across 1870s southern Arizona in order to find an elusive frontier musician. But it is also the director’s love letter to Quantum Physics, Animation, Music and Memories. Through a combination of Hugh Everett’s Many Worlds Theory, Erwin Schrödinger's Paradox of Quantum Superposition and Richard Feynman’s Posterior and Anterior Time Wave Theory the film presents human memory as only comprehensible through art…and each type of art in the film in turn represents its own competing timeline.

Using a vibrant mix of 16mm live action film, paper cut outs, hand drawn animation, oil paintings, 8k video, collages and digital animation, with live musical performances by Neko Case, John Doe, Howe Gelb and Xixa. The wide-open spaces of the southwestern desert are as much a part of the cast as the eclectic performers. And oh, yeah…there’s a lot of gun fights, horses, cacti and time travel.

About the director: Geoff Marslett (born in Texas) is an animator, director, writer, producer and actor. His work often revolves around the romance of connection and the way exploring your universe changes you and the place you explore. He grew up a cowboy with an interest in physics, and has worked in both construction and science before becoming a filmmaker. He adores feral cats and still genuinely loves making things. He splits his time between teaching at the University of Colorado and making his own films.

Director's Statement: Before I was a filmmaker I worked at the Naval Research Lab and studied physics. Science has always been a major influence on my own artwork. In particular, this is a film about art’s role in how we understand memory and how we define history.

We used animation to represent multiple worlds and uncertainty theory. It is sometimes a challenging watch, but I hope we have created a wonderful cast of eclectic characters and individual artists in order to make solving the puzzle surprisingly fun.

This is the most ambitious and rewarding film I have ever made. I was able to direct what I would confidently call the coolest cast I could have imagined working with. Lily and Kiowa are rising stars in the new wave of Indigenous Cinema (and not only acted in, but came aboard as part of the producing team). Gary Farmer (Dead Man, Reservation Dogs), Alex Cox (Repo Man, Sid and Nancy) and Anna Karina (Alphaville, French New Wave) are three of my personal cinematic heroes. I cannot overstate how exciting it was for me to have them all be a part of my film. Musically my lucky streak kept going, and I was able include three of my musical heroes, Neko Case, John Doe and Howe Gelb to bring our version of “what music really sounded like in the wild west”. Then we added David Arquette and one of the greatest voices on Broadway, Patrick Page, new faces John Way, Devon Wycoff, Jesse Lee Pacheco and Antonio Jeffries as well as past collaborators Trieste Kelly Dunn and Frank Mosley and desert rockers, Xixa to the motley crew.

Behind the scenes we went about collecting artists, not to all create a homogenous animated style, but to embrace artistic diversity. Each animator was encouraged to create characters in their own personal style- and these styles varied wonderfully. The animation team included roughly 65 artists from all over the world (Kyoto, Austin, Paris, Lisbon, Denver, New York, Santiago, Los Angeles, Boise, Chicago, Baltimore, Rio, Mexico City, San Diego, Boulder, Santa Fe, etc.) and from wildly differing artistic and personal backgrounds.

I hope y’all enjoy the film. It is a wild ride!

Geoff