My work centers around identity, faith, and truth. I make comedies that follow the off-beat endeavors of the alienated and the oblivious. In the future, I would like to make work that speaks to a social consciousness that I am sensing in my generation. I fear and acknowledge that people in my age group do not have a lot of hope for the future. Why would or should they? And I would like to square that circle artistically, and offer people a reason to remain sober and pessimistic while also anticipating something great and human on the horizon. I think this oscillation between despair and hope is what America is best at.
I don't want to be glib, but I want to acknowledge the overwhelming hopelessness of our moment as a conduit to finding something real and tangible that we can hold closer to our heart.
I'm going to make "r/infidelity", a feature film about love, imperialism, and fate. The tone is a mix between acerbic irony and lovesick optimism. My last film "Nimrod", which was made through your support, tackled something similar. That film dealt with mental health and suicide from a similar lens. Something that acknowledges the humor in something so atrocious. The reaction I've gotten has been overwhelmingly positive by suicide survivors, who have said that the film is the first time they felt understood and not condescended to. I want to inspire my generation in a similar way. Specifically on the issues of America's bombing campaigns abroad.
A synopsis:
r/infidelity is a feature film about the stories we tell ourselves in a relationship. Kris, a young Chaucer scholar, is hopelessly in love with Clara, a risk analyst for a multinational bank specializing in conflicts in the Middle East. Both are American.
The story is framed within a reddit post. Kris posts speculating whether Clara is cheating on him or not. We flash back to his side of the story. He decides to surprise Clara on her vacation to Paris intent on proposing to her, when he begins to suspect she's slept with somebody else while on a work trip to the Middle East. The suspicions begin to point to an affair with an international arms dealer that she met in the region. In spite of the suspicions, he proposes to her anyway.
In the present, when he posts the story, we learn that today is the day he's supposed to marry Clara. However, he has been cheating on her since Paris.
Clara finds the reddit post and plots her revenge of Kris. She discovers the truth about his affair and outs it for all to see at the wedding. Kris hides in a bathroom stall, she calls in the priest, and the two marry behind a stall door.
I am most inspired by the writing of Don Delillo and the films of Mike Leigh. I think this film may resemble some elements of the two of them, in that I want to be honest with the irony and skepticism of the moment we're in, while also finding something human underneath the layers of deception.
