“I’ve discovered that the only way you get to make a film is if you’ve already made a film,” a disillusioned young producer—a low-level employee moonlighting from his day job at an arthouse distributor—says to a first-time director in Julian Castronovo’s forthcoming debut feature. The filmmaker he is speaking to is also named Julian Castronovo, and the film the young producer is failing to get financed bears a sideways resemblance to the one we’re watching. Dealing with the search for a disappeared art forger, the movie the on-screen Castronovo pitches is an ambitious hybrid dealing with “the discourse of authenticity” that works with “reenactment and performance and other forms of duplicity.” As for the producer’s line, it’s a variation on one Castronovo says he heard at a studio internship. “I was drawn to the paradox of it,” he says, “and wondered if I could solve it for myself by inventing a fiction in which I am thrust into circumstances where making a film is an inevitability rather than an impossibility.”

Now in post-production, Debut, or, Objects of the Field of Debris as Currently Catalogued, is the graduating CalArts filmmaker’s ingenious solution to that first-feature paradox, a work that’s both ruthlessly economical—its budget was $900—and overflowing with sly creative invention. Nominally a laptop movie in that the computer screen is the film’s frame, Debut deploys the genre’s usual formal elements—browser windows, Google Earth images, stuttering .mov clips—while adding a profusion of other material, from 3D animation to iPhone-shot location footage to dolls and miniature work. “In some ways, it was a very difficult film to make,” says Castronovo, “and in other ways, it was very easy. I basically made the entire thing sitting at my desk in my bedroom.”

Inspired, particularly, by the work of some of Castronovo’s favorite authors (he cites W.G. Sebald, John Ashberry and Thomas Pynchon as reference points for the film’s narrative sprawl, while a Raymond Chandler quote provides one key plot point), as well as visual art (a Chinese performance artist reads as a composite of Yoko Ono, Ana Mendieta and Sophie Calle), the filmmaker drew from the latter practice in conceptualizing Debut. “I liked the idea that I could be a filmmaker in a way that resembled having a studio practice,” he says, “where I wake up, have these images that I want to make and just try different things. If I mess up, who cares? I’ll just wake up and do it again the next day rather than [having] the pressure of running a set, where if you don’t get it you’ve fucked up big time.”

As for the counterfeit art narrative, that’s inspired by the real-life case of New York dealer Ely Sakhai, who was charged by the FBI with selling forged impressionist paintings. After reading the original FBI documents, Castronovo became fascinated with one aspect of the fraud—that, based on the brush strokes, the actual forger was speculated to be a young Chinese person. “I was interested in that link between this type of aesthetic creation that occurs somewhat in a vacuum but then, when it’s interpreted in this real context, takes on these racial or cultural qualities. So, I invented a fiction from that.”

Castronovo grew up in Verona, Wisconsin, and did his undergraduate studies at Brown in the Modern Culture and Media department, which was called Art-Semiotics when director Todd Haynes studied there in the 1980s. (“I met him when he came to do a visiting artist’s thing and learned that I lived in the same apartment he lived in,” Castronovo says.) Debut is a culmination of works made at CalArts and Brown, including shorts Hannah’s Video (2020), Noise (2022) and This Living Hand (2024). Hannah’s Video and Noise both deal with racial and social subtexts around ritualized on-camera performance (a memorial video and audition tapes, respectively), while, in This Living Hand, “a pleasure doll malfunctions such that it begins reciting the poetry of John Keats.” Castronovo also publishes fiction and essays. Among the latter are one on the 2024 Samuel Beckett Conference for the Los Angeles Review of Books and another, for Brooklyn Rail, theorizing the meanings of a portrait of Michel Foucault hanging in the office of secretive tech overlord Palantir.

Castronovo says he expects Debut “to premiere at a major festival in early 2025.” He’s already working on his second feature, which “may traverse similar ground to this one in that it’s kind of metafictional,” he says. “It will be a courtroom drama chronicling the trial of a young director named Julian Castronovo who has created an unauthorized digital performer in the image of the actor Charles Melton.”—Scott Macaulay/Image: J. Luciano von Astor