Up-and-coming director Ethan Kane — nominated for two AVN Awards this year in recognition of his skill behind the camera (Best Director – Non-Feature for the Digital Sin title Game and Director of the Year) — has just expanded his oeuvre with two new releases, Ice and The Surreal World.
Both incorporating Kane's ultra-slick production veneer, the titles are nonetheless quite disparate in terms of their look and style. While Ice, a New Sensations project, is lush, opulent and highly art-directed, Surreal World, released through New Sensations' sister imprint Greedy, is an MTV-style reality porn effort.
Half of Surreal and the entirety of Ice were shot in Budapest, where Kane told AVN.com he sees a lot of advantages to bringing his productions, not the least of which being the amount of bang he can get out of his buck there.
"Over there, the resources that are available to you are 10 times more than they are over here, and they cost a hundred times less," he explained. "If I can go over there and shoot a movie for the same price as I do over here, then my movie is going to look like it cost three times as much. And they have a great talent pool when it comes to women."
With Surreal World, Kane utilized said talent pool in a way not commonly seen: Depicting them socializing and just being themselves, a la Shane's World.
"It's amazing," Kane commented. "These girls are college educated, full-time job, they're brilliant, but they just don't make enough money, so they do porn to make extra money. But when you hang out with them, they're so funny, and a lot of them speak English; so we're hanging out with these girls and I said, 'We happen to be sitting here having a barbecue, why not just capture all this?'
Ice, on the other hand, goes the polar opposite direction from the reality aesthetic, painting an abstract, fictional portrait of, as Kane described it, "a wealthy man who's achieved everything that he's wanted to achieve monetarily, and now has realized that despite having all these material things, he's not satisfied. He still is longing for something that's missing in his life. And he realizes that his greatest asset is being able to manipulate people and situations, and get people to do things that they normally wouldn't do."
Though he said the movie does have some voiceover narration, Kane professed that, "I try to tell the story through visuals. I take the story and develop a mood, and develop a look and a style that resembles that, and through a minimal amount of words and a minimal amount of acting, tell that same story. Almost like poetry."
The poetry of Ice and the prose of The Surreal World can be found in stores now.
