Use the search bar to find projects, completed films, and TFL community members.

Projects

Words That Burn

synopsis

Ezekiel, a for-hire driver, posts a filmed diary of his delirious nights behind the wheel. He becomes obsessed by Monica, a passenger he relentlessly looks for – “the slut, the whore, the cheeky one” – he says to the camera. Aurora is a content moderator who must decide to censor videos that have been posted online. Among them, she discovers Ezekiel’s footage of him stalking her friend Monica. The boundaries between real and virtual life that had kept Aurora safe collapse. Haunted by Ezekiel, Aurora watches him grow closer to a radicalised far-right group and senses with helpless certainty that he is going to do something terrible. Yet no one around her take his threats seriously. When Monica disappears, Aurora realises that staying behind her screen is no longer enough: she must step into the world before it is too late. She kidnaps Ezekiel and drags him deep into the desert, ready to do whatever it takes to find Monica. In an abandoned Hollywood western set, Aurora points her gun at him.

Director’statement

We live in viral times, where a small spark is enough to light the fuse of a fire that polarises everything. Two archetypical figures coexist on social media: the censor and the conspirator. Both read images as a code of hidden signs. While the censor searches for what might be forbidden, limiting freedom of expression to protect physical or moral integrity, the conspirator looks for evidence to prove his paranoid message, using the same freedom of expression to spread ideas that ultimately undermine it. Democracy is built upon the paradox that we must tolerate intolerance – but to what extent? Hate speech travels across the internet at breakneck speed, turning its back on facts, multiplying faster than it can be deleted. Yet it is not only about words that stigmatise and persecute. Words also kill. Aurora fights this fire, but every decision she makes seems to fan the flames. Caught in a frantic race to prevent the worst, Aurora finds the very violence she opposes seeping into her life, immersing her in an alternate reality where facts fracture, images deceive, and truth dissolves.

All the updates once a month in your mailbox, subscribe to the TFL newsletter.

Join us