THE FLAT EARTH

FICTION FEATURE IN DEVELOPMENT

WRITTEN BY LAURA NASMYTH - pRODUCED BY LENA WEISS AND EUGEN KLIM AT GLITTER & DOOM

logline

A young person struggles to create a real life for themselves in an increasingly virtual world.

Taking on the popular conspiracy theory, the film is set on a physically flat earth, a world of flatscreens, smoothed over online profiles, binary code and biased algorithms.

#grounded sci-fi #lgbtq #comingofage #gender #conspiracies

synopsis

Adapted from the age-old conspiracy theory, the world is set on a flat earth. A disc-shaped planet that has always been flat and always will be. The flatness represents the two-dimensional world of flat-screens and smoothed over online profiles and is polarised into two groups of people - ‘Atheists’ that live in the remoter regions towards the periphery and are afraid of what wi-fi does to your brain. And those that live in the centre where signal is strongest and who live in a perpetual machine of content creation and content consumption. If you do not submit to the algorithm, your content will slowly but surely disappear and with no content on the flat earth, you do not exist.

The story follows Cy, a 25 year old, who like all others, produces social media content in a creator factory. We join her in a Mid-Tier Hub, where she lives and works in the rows upon rows of tiny cubicles, in which creators sit in front of bright ring-lights day in, day out. Identity and commerce converge, as the human billboards hold products into their phone cameras. The Top Tier Hubs are reserved for the most successful creators - homogenous Barbie and Kens - but Cy does not fit into the dichotomy of the flat earth. She is a loud-mouthed tomboy that makes sarcastic videos and she does not clearly adhere to the rigid gender binary that the algorithm prefers. So in order to survive, she starts to perform femininity until she cannot take it any longer.

Cy crosses paths in the hub with Neema, who is around the same age as Cy, fun, nerdy and a lot more realistic. but Being a bi-racial woman of colour with an obsession with all things plants, Neema too suffers from the algorithm’s prejudices. The two have no interest in each other’s content or general vibe, until they both end up on the street together, with no Hubs left to go.

Initially teaming up for safety and attempting to create content from the streets, in front of makeshift city backdrops, they soon discover that they are not so different after all and maybe they can find a way to combine forces and head out to remoter pastures, defying the odds and mimicking travel bloggers to make ends meet. Trapped between a rush of emotional excitement, Neema and Cy plough their way across the flat earth and their relationship turns into something more romantic.

As they venture further and further out, they are increasingly confronted with reality though - the backstage area to the city’s shiny facade - experiencing nature for the first time and witnessing the physical labor that feeds the city.

Soon enough, Neema finds it harder to keep up their performative front and yearns for something more real, eventually convincing Cy. But after attempting to show a more authentic side of their travels, posting glimpses of the field worker’s reality, the algorithm abruptly strips them of their profile, citing ‘political content violations’. This tipping point, encourages the two to try and seek out a new frontier in the forests - maybe the atheists are on to something, and they can finally be free of the confines of the algorithm?

Taking on an actual job at a diner in the middle of an idyllic forest setting, the two start to relax into their new life, but it does not take long for Cy to start feeling withdrawal symptoms from her dopamine fueled past and she starts to hallucinate.

Eventually she has to decide whether to keep running from herself or turn back and face the fact that she will never find her utopia, but has to build it herself, taking matters into her own hands to reclaim the space that no one wanted to give her.

We are left asking - how do we define our reality in the information age? Are we creating an unstoppable spiral of make belief or are lucky to have alternative realities to escape to - and who is allowed in the frame and who gets cropped out?

comparisons

The film embraces the surreal social commentary of Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster, the rawness with which Andrea Arnold portrays youth in American Honey and the satirical absurdity of Emma Seligman’s Bottoms.

PROJECT STATUS

the grounded sci-fi currently exists in the form of a 90 minute original screenplay, and has been developed with the support of Film Independent’s Directing Lab 2020, funding from the Austrian Film Institute and Produced by Glitter and Doom.

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