Winner of the Best Documentary Award at the Tribeca Film Festival 2014, Blue Ice Docs presents POINT AND SHOOT, openening in Toronto at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema on Friday, November 21st.

From two-time Academy Award nominated (Street Fight, If A Tree Falls) documentary filmmaker Marshall Curry, POINT AND SHOOT follows Matt Van Dyke, a timid 26-year-old with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, who left home in Baltimore in 2006 and set off on a self-described “crash course in manhood”. Inspired by an Australian proto-reality TV show, he sets off—not just to have an adventure—but to cast himself as a character in an adventure movie. He bought a motorcycle and a video camera and began a multi-year, 35,000-mile motorcycle trip through Northern Africa and the Middle East.

While traveling, he struck up an unlikely friendship with a Libyan hippie, and when revolution broke out in Libya, Matt joined his friend in the fight against dictator Muammar Gaddafi. With a gun in one hand and a camera in the other, Matt fought in — and filmed — the war until he was captured by Gaddafi forces and held in solitary confinement for six months.

It is a harrowing and sometimes humorous story of a young man’s search for political revolution and personal transformation.

Matt finds that with his camera he can manage his Obsessive Compulsive Disorder: putting a frame around an experience somehow turns it into something he can control. He creates a braver, more confident version of himself whom he plays in his movie, but as the experience continues he actually starts to become the character that initially he was simply playing on film.

The Libyan soldiers, also, were shaped by the movies they had seen, and the presence of the cameras in their midst. As Matt says, “They wanted to be filmed acting like soldiers, even though that’s what they actually were.”

Upon his return to the U.S. Matt emailed Marshall, introduced himself and said he had hundreds of hours of footage that he thought would make a good documentary. After meeting, Marshall agreed to go forward with a film using Matt’s footage, and also shot his own 20 hr of interview footage.

“Like ‘The Kid Stays in The Picture’ or ‘Fog of War’ this film would be built around one person’s subjective recounting of his life”, said Marshall Curry. “And I knew that different people would interpret their 85-minute “car ride” with Matt VanDyke differently. Was he Lawrence of Arabia? Don Quixote? Christopher McCandless from Into the Wild? Ernest Hemingway in the Spanish Civil War? Or some combination who had changed and morphed over the course of his life?”

About the Director, Producer & Editor

Marshall Curry is a two-time Academy Award nominated documentary director. He got his start directing, shooting, and editing STREET FIGHT, which follows Cory Booker’s first run for mayor of Newark. It was nominated for an Academy Award and an Emmy. After STREET FIGHT, Curry was the director and producer, as well as one of the cinematographers and editors, of RACING DREAMS, which follows two boys and a girl who dream of racing in NASCAR. The film won numerous awards, including Best Documentary at the Tribeca Film Festival and is being developed into a fiction film by Dreamworks. Curry’s third documentary (director, editor, writer), IF A TREE FALLS: A STORY OF THE EARTH LIBERATION FRONT, follows an environmentalist who faced life in prison for burning two timber facilities. It won the Sundance Film Festival award for Best Documentary Editing and was nominated for an Academy Award.

For more info please visit film website