Treasure Island (Scott King, 1999)

A black and white still from Treasure Island. A man, a young Nick Offerman, sits perched on a desk, cigarette hanging from his mouth.

Saturday 26.10.24 @ OFFLINE | 13.00
1hr 26m | DCP | 4K Restoration World Premiere | 25th Anniversary

weekend pass
single tickets
sold out
notes on treasure island

Frank (Lance Baker) and Samuel (Nick Offerman), two intelligence officers on the San Francisco Bay naval base of Treasure Island – where letters from service men and their families at home were read for code messages to the enemies – are charged with creating an entirely new identity for a dead man’s body (Jonah Blechman). As Frank and Samuel compose letters to be planted on the corpse before it is dumped into the Pacific (in hopes that the Japanese will find it and act on the misinformation), the corpse’s real identity reveals to them – and to us – the true nature of the American identity circa 1945.

Restored from the director’s own print especially for Weird Weekend, this world premiere of the 4K Restoration marks the 25th anniversary of the film, which won the Special Jury Prize at Sundance 1999. Loosely inspired, via Ewen Montagu’s The Man Who Never Was, by Operation Mincemeat (a British military scheme, utilising the body of a homeless man, disguised as a Royal Marines Officer, to hoodwink Hitler), Treasure Island explodes the absurdity of imagined pasts. Starring Nick Offerman in one of his earliest roles (“an ambitiously strange film that I’m still staunchly proud of”), Treasure Island rejects the often sanitised picturings of days-gone-by, presenting us instead with uncomfortable facets of past and present society. Now, a quarter of a century later, we may view the film itself through a different lens.

Writer-director Scott King join us in person for a post-screening Q&A

C/w Discriminatory Language, Outdated Cultural Depictions, Racism, Sexual Assault

NB the entire Weird Weekend programme is presented with descriptive subtitles and optional audio description.

Thanks to Scott King & Screen Scotland

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