As I hinted in my first entry on Sundance 2021, I’ve spent a couple hours a day on the festival’s browser-based New Frontier space, which houses all 14 projects in the New Frontier selection, a space for watching select films in VR and Film Party, an online proximity-based video and audio chat space. There’s also a digital ferry from the Gallery to IDFA DocLab’s do {not} play platform, which was for IDFA (the world’s largest documentary festival and marketplace, held in Amsterdam in November of every year) what Film Party is to Sundance. Navigating the Sundance digital platform through my […]

She’s turning into plastic. He feels like his body is being taken over by an indescribable entity. Another discovers grotesque clusters of gray pustules suddenly colonizing the terrain of their body.  These individuals are documenting themselves in the throes of The World’s Fair Challenge, an online role-playing game that dares those bold enough to participate to draw blood, watch a neon-soaked strobing video and record the ensuing horror that eventually consumes their corporeal vessels. Casey (played by Anna Cobb in her debut role), a nondescript yet quietly rebellious teenager living in a perfectly captured amalgamation of American suburbia, becomes the […]

How did events of 2020—any of them—change your film, either in the way you approached it, produced it, post-produced it, or are now thinking about it? My film was shot just before the pandemic (wrapped March 1 2020—what luck!), which is a fact that the few people who have seen it so far sometimes find hard to believe. The movie is quite concerned with isolation. It is about characters who never leave the house, whose main form of social connection happens through screens, who exist in a virtual realm that is sort of real and sort of unreal. While writing […]