Eight-hour film aims to be a sleeper hit
Movie meets meditation as Baa Baa Land treats viewers to epic snooze-fest
If people are still awake by the end of the film Peter Freedman just helped make, he’ll feel like he didn’t do his job right.
The upcoming eight-hour slowmotion film Baa Baa Land doesn’t include people, dialogue or a storyline . . . just hour after hour of sheep being sheep in a field near Tiptree, England.
“The main purpose was to come up with something that was relaxing and would help people lie down and drift off to sleep,” said Freedman, a London-based Torontonian who’s helped produce the film and runs Think Inc, a PR consulting group based in Britain.
The movie was commissioned by Calm.com, a U.S.-based website and app launched by two Brits that, as its name implies, aims to help its users relax.
Baa Baa Land, which is set to premiere in its entirety at a theatre in London this September and online at the same time, lands somewhere between a film and a meditation, Freedman said.
There is no North American premiere scheduled yet, but Freedman said he hopes one can eventually happen.
“Nowadays, people are more and more focused on video and film and watching things rather than reading things, so we thought this could be the ultimate way to help them count sheep,” he said. “We thought it could be the ultimate insomnia cure.”
He noted that the film comes at a time where the trend of slow cinema — a style of filmmaking characterized by long takes and lack of scripted narrative — appears to be starting to interest mainstream audiences.
Baa Baa Land was shot over a couple of days in a field about an hour and a half outside of London. Most of the shots included last for about half an hour and the film’s length is a nod to an often-quoted desirable amount of sleep, its producers say.
The movie’s trailer suggests it just might be the “dullest movie ever made” — a claim Freedman said he and his team are embracing as a compliment. “That’s sort of an extreme way of saying we want it to be the most relaxing and slowest movie ever made,” he said.
Its only competition might be the sort of really slow cinema that Andy Warhol championed, such as his 1964 film Empire, featuring eight hours of slow-motion footage of the Empire State Building.
And unlike its namesake La La Land, don’t expect Baa Baa Land to elicit any Oscar nods — just nodding off.
Michael Acton Smith, co-founder of Calm.com and co-executive producer of Baa Baa Land, said his company’s mission is to make people happier and healthier by making them more calm, and that they’re looking at new ways to do that.
“We all know how addicted everyone is to Netflix and YouTube, and we thought, ‘wouldn’t it be cool to create one of the world’s most relaxing films — an eight-hour epic just focused on sheep?’ ” said Acton Smith. “We thought it’d fun and a little bit quirky, and hopefully people find it super relaxing.”
Alex Tew, co-founder of Calm.com and Baa Baa Land co-executive producer, said the idea for the film builds on a Calm.com feature that offers audio bedtime stories for adults. His team wondered whether a video version might be possible.
“Talking with Peter (Freedman), we came up with this idea of a sheep masterpiece . . . we often talk about counting sheep, and now you really can,” Tew said.
Mark Boulos, a neurologist at Toronto’s Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre who specializes in sleep dis- orders, said “official sleep hygiene rules” say staring at a bright screen before bed is not recommended. Still, he was intrigued by Baa Baa Land’s concept and believes activities that promote slowing down may help some doze off.
“We have so many things going on in life, each and every one of us, that sometimes having all that action keeps you up at night and things are on your mind,” he said.
“I think just slowing down and watching something like that may be beneficial for some people,” he said, noting that some may still require formal treatment or medication.