In his newest cinematic experiment, Michel Gondry coins a new word, “sweding,” which already has taken on a life of its own on the Internet. To “swede” a movie is to remake it from scratch, and it’s an idea that has intrigued Gondry for many years. “I had the concept from a long time ago to get people from the neighborhood to get together and create their own film and watch it together,” he said. “They would pay the same amount of money they would spend if they would go and see a movie, and with this money, they would finance the next project and so on.”

In Be Kind Rewind, Jack Black stars as Jerry, a New Jersey cinephile who accidentally erases a local video rental store’s entire stock of VHS movies when his brain becomes magnetized during a power plant mishap. His resourceful childhood friend Mike (Mos Def), who has been left in charge of the store in the owner’s absence, concocts a scheme to remake the films one by one using a video camera, the neighbors, and readily available materials. Even though the “sweded” results are hardly as slick as studio fare, the moviemaking process intrigues and revitalizes the video store and the entire town.

The film’s inciting incident was inspired by mechanic Irv Gooch, a Passaic, New Jersey native who has collaborated with Gondry on several projects in the past. “I went to visit him, and he works there [in Passaic] in the junkyard, and the power plant is next to it,” said Gondry. “In fact, he plays the mechanic, Wilson, in the film. So I got the idea of how Jerry, Jack’s character, would get magnetized to erase the tapes from visiting him.”

Gondry strove to involve as many of the residents of Passaic in the film as possible by including them as dancers and extras. To ensure that life also imitates art for those living outside of Passaic, Gondry is planning an interactive “sweding” exhibit at the New York art gallery Deitch Projects. Visitors will be able to shoot their own low-tech movies and take home copies, and the gallery will keep the “sweded” films on file for viewing and rental.

“It’s like a home movie, but it’s a town movie,” explained Gondry. “The comment I’m making is that people don’t have to consume what the big corporations are making. It’s sort of sad when you go out on Saturday night, and you see all those kids who are wearing those huge brand-name clothes. They look like billboards, and I don’t know how much they realize that they are absorbed into the system. It’s not something that people are told: that they can really create their own entertainment.”