The Exchange

Producer: Byron Karabatsos

CIA drug trafficking in American cities is the punch line. But Ralfi doesn't find it all that funny. As he prepares for fatherhood, he's forced to make a tough decision: either spend the next five years in prison, or go along with the joke and sell 10 kilos of cocaine. The Exchange is based loosely on alleged events that occurred during the Iran/Contra scandal in the 1980s. The film was shot and edited the film around the time the Iraq war began. At that time, it seemed to Karabatsos that the Bush Administration was telling a lot of lies. It also seemed to him that mainstream media outlets could have done a better job reporting the truth. Here, he tried to achieve a level of irony between form and content that left viewers thinking about how we consume information.

Byron Karabatsos is a Philadelphia based video/filmmaker. His short films have screened and won awards at several domestic and international festivals, including: the 10th Annual Sarasota Film Festival, the 30th annual Big Muddy Film Festival, the 25th annual Denver International Film Festival, the 2008 Maryland Film Festival and San Francisco’s Short Film Festival. He’s received grants from Philadelphia’s Independent Film and Video Association (PIFVA), Temple University, and Microsoft Corporation. As a video installation artist, he’s collaborated with choreographers Tania Isaac’s Dance Company (Standpipe), the Reactionaries (Shines When the Sunshine Shifts), and Nichole Canuso Dance Company on Wandering Alice for the 2008 Philadelphia Live Arts Festivals. He received an MFA from Temple University’s Film Program. He also holds a BA and MPP from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He teaches film production, editing, screenwriting and film theory courses at Temple University and University of the Arts in Philadelphia. He’s working on an independent feature length documentary on Headlong Dance Company. For more information, visit www.byronkarabatsos.com.