Controversial Child Labor Cartoon

Barry Levy, the award-winning indie filmmaker will be in attendance, Thursday, May 14th, when 'Division Denim' makes its world debut at The 8th Annual Santa Cruz Film Festival.

Levy made the short film after a humorous conversation he had with co-writer Rick Mosier. He recalls, “We were talking about the commercial Lenny Kravitz did for the GAP a few years ago. The question came up, what would the kid in the third world sweat shop do if he could somehow crash the shoot for Lenny’s commercial?”

The answer, needless to say is pretty explosive. Barry worked with the renowned animation house Monkey Paw Media, http://www.monkeypawmedia.com/mainpage.html of ‘Skunk Fu’ and ‘Edgar and Ellen’ fame. Levy recalls, “I can’t draw, in fact I can barely sign my own name, so we worked at putting together contemporary images of rock stars, built a bunch of cliché’s on top of each other, and went for a look that Todd McFarlane, (‘Spawn’) would put out. Once we arrived at the final characters, I just let Monkey Paw go nuts.”

This will mark Barry’s second appearance in Santa Cruz. His live action short film, ‘Check Brights’, the dark tale of a highway vigilante won the Audience Award for Best Experimental Work at the fest last year. It also went on to win Best Dramatic Short at The Berkeley Video and Film Festival.

Levy burst onto the indie film scene in 2003 with his highly controversial feature film, ‘Spook’ which ended up winning 8 festival awards. He has a full feature script in the works for ‘Check Brights’ that he would love to shoot in the Santa Cruz area. “This part of the world is spectacular. I fell in love with it when I was here in 2008, and started planning shots during my drive back to Los Angeles on the Pacific Coast Highway.”

Next in the pipeline for Barry is a cartoon tv series for kids and family called ‘The Hollywood Adventures of Freedom the Polar Bear’, inspired by his staunch support for the Green movement, and his own long adventure that eventually got him to Hollywood.

Learn more about Barry Levy and his work at http://barrylevy.com/