Inney Prakash

In search of transcendence through stone skipping, an idealistic drifter arrives in a quiet lakeside town. Facing resistance from unimpressed locals, and pursued by members of his former skipping crew, he is forced to consider the merit of his lifelong quest.

Ernie Burroughs cares about one thing: being funny. After graduating high school, he devotes his days to posting videos of his act online, waiting to get discovered. When his dad insists he either go to college or get a job, Ernie offers a compromise: he'll join a youth theatre group. His dad agrees under one condition: he cannot quit. Ms. Reddy, the theatre's charismatic director, instantly senses something special about Ernie and casts him as the lead of her upcoming "group-devised" production. Ernie is thrilled until he realizes the play will be about a school shooting and he will be playing the shooter. Gradually, the play infects his life, his mind and his relationships. He grows suspicious of the world around him, believing that something sinister behind the scenes is manipulating him toward an inevitably violent end.

A food market and playground in Queens, NY becomes the site for this film inspired by Paolo Javier’s Original Brown Boy poems. The film itself transforms into an ars poetica/cinematica—a meditation on writing and making images in the liminal space between a global pandemic and what might come next—as five New York City performers speak in verse while wandering through food stalls in search of a new sensation.

Between pandemics, people’s revolts and male institutions, this period film cheekily combines fantastic psychedelia and handmade sets. Inspired by the life story of Julian of Norwich, a 14th-century mystic and the first woman to write a book in English.