DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT/SUMMARY: This film centers around one performance, when Holland-based musicians, The Ex, visited New York to play a concert. This performance is intercut with city scenes, first from Amsterdam and then New York, of construction sites, street life, and protests against the Iraq war and the Bush administration. The construction site scenes relate to the band's dedication to music as a realm for collaborative building and creative destruction. The protest scenes, which include shots from the Republican National Convention that had just taken place in NYC, serve to foreground the band's essentially political nature. Nonetheless, the core of Mousetrap is the music made at a particular moment. Some documentaries seek to teach or explicate. This one exists primarily to answer a different question: What was it like? (Some might call it a "document," rather than a documentary). It also has elements of the cinematic tradition of the city symphony. In any case, we had no intention of making a traditional documentary film. In regards to this project's place in the realm of music and the moving image: in an arena dominated by pop star celebrities, lip-sync music videos, and ad-agency branding of rock-n-roll as a "lifestyle commodity," the film hopes simply to remind people of another, more grounded reality. It is that of musicians at work, seeing how far they can push their interplay and their instruments. This is not a promotional film. It is a music film. I believe in this distinction.