FILM: SELF TAPE

SELF TAPE

“Sasha, a beautiful young actress, has just been dropped by her talent agency. “She was saying her words but I wasn’t getting the love,” the casting director had explained. And Sasha knows the critique is true: some unknown thing, buried deep within her, is keeping her alienated from her own spiritual centers. Alone at home with a glass of wine and her sole close companion, a “dinobaby” plush toy she has kept since childhood, Sasha pleads for an angel to rescue her. But she laments that the audition “selftape” she’ll record the next day will mark the end of her career. The following morning  Sasha is “photo-mugged” on a busy Beverly Hills street by a hostile, candy bar-addicted, female paparazza who at first mistakes Sasha for a well-known movie star.  Sasha flees but the paparazza pursues her, emerging from inside Sasha’s own iPhone to invade her home and, indeed, her mind. The paparazza goads Sasha to exhume and relive the long-buried, soul-murdering acts of cruelty that had caused Sasha’s very identity to split into pieces and her emotions to go numb after she had miscarried a child.  In so doing, the paparazza discovers she is deeply, spiritually connected to Sasha. Having exiled herself from a horrific past she can almost but not quite remember, the paparazza yearns to “come home” to her. Like a woman’s prayer for an angel’s healing, an angel’s own anguished plea proves no less strong.”