The Story
Project Panopticon is a drama film about Minka, an aspiring actress preparing for her exams at the Theatre Academy of Helsinki. As an advanced commision, she is given a monologue that deals with truthfulness. During her preparation Minka is struggling to find confidence over her doubts as her relationships only poison her self-esteem and make her more doubtful of her own talent. Only few days before the exams, Minka finds a mysterious screenplay on her door that seems to describe her own life with distrubingly great detail.
Imagination, fiction and reality start to merge, as Minka sinks deeper down into the depths of her own psyche.
Themes
Project Panopticon deals with the themes of authenticity, ambition and identity. It's a film about watching and being watched, an investigation of human behaviour under social pressure. We crave for a connection with others, yet at the same time we still want to lead our own lives, to make our own desicions, independent of the feedback.
​
The name of the title derives from the concept of panopticon, first used as a name for a prison structure developed by a British social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th century. In the classical prison model this was demonstrated by a watchtower, through which the guards could see all of the prisoners at the same time, yet the prisoners could not see the watchman. Later further developed by the French philosopher Michel Foucault, a panoptic system is any system where an anonymous power is presented and reinforced into the subjects by the subjects themselves. Foucault uses this same construct as an allegory for a modern society. The word 'panopticon' means "that which sees all" (opticon = to observe, pan = everything).
Style
Project Panopticon is a metamodernist film, following and upgrading the heritage of postmodern cinema. There's a huge amount of influences that have taken the film where it stands. One of the core ideas behind the style is the oscillation between chaos and coherence; the fragmentary jumpcut style versus the steady long take, the beauty of classical music versus the horror of ambient noise, the classical storytelling narrative versus the open ended epic dramaturgy.