The closing days of W.W.II. Treasure Island is a secret naval institution in San Francisco where intelligence experts censor all mail--seeking out hidden messages coded into birthday cards and love letters. Two such cryptographers, Frank and Sam, concoct a plan to outfit a dead body with falsified letters, to be dumped into the ocean as a wartime decoy--his letters containing coded misinformation to mislead the enemy.

This much, at least, is true.

But in Treasure Island, communication is a zero-sum game: for every truth revealed, some other knowledge is taken away. The more one knows, the less one understands.

And as Frank and Sam devise the fictional backstory for their dead soldier, they project more and more of their own private lives into him--hidden desires and fears so secret that the project begins to haunt them. Is the Body, lying comatose in a refrigerated coffin in their office, indeed dead--or have they conjured his corpse back to become an irrevocable part of their own lives?

First-time director Scott King announced himself as a truly original voice in cinema with this audacious, auspicious debut. In an incident that quickly became notorious in the world of independent film, Treasure Island won the Jury Prize of the 1999 Sundance Festival but was rejected by all the mainstream distributors, and nearly buried. All Day Entertainment joined with King to give Treasure Island a second chance on DVD in this deluxe special edition disc.