Fidelity
New York City, New York | Film Feature
Drama
A psychological drama weaving three storylines around Mira, a young Asian-American actress who finds herself pretending to be a dying man's lost daughter, as she confronts the story she grew up with about her own father's disappearance.
Fidelity
New York City, New York | Film Feature
Drama
1 Campaigns | New York, United States
Green Light
This campaign raised $21,245 for production. Follow the filmmaker to receive future updates on this project.
77 supporters | followers
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A psychological drama weaving three storylines around Mira, a young Asian-American actress who finds herself pretending to be a dying man's lost daughter, as she confronts the story she grew up with about her own father's disappearance.
About The Project
- The Story
- Wishlist
- Updates
- The Team
- Community
Mission Statement
The Story
At its heart, FIDELITY is about our unrelenting instinct to make sense of our past, and the fictions we are willing to live and die with.
The film centers on MIRA, a promising actress entering her 30s who questions her future as an artist. She takes an acting class with an overbearing coach, but a meaningful community of peers. She navigates gigs that are tangential to acting but not quite acting, like lending her likeness to an AI avatar for an educational app, or voicing children’s audiobooks - not the kind of work she had always dreamed about. At a career crossroads, pining for roles with more emotional depth, she finds an intriguing opportunity to stand in for the daughter of a terminally ill man.
That man is Kim, lonely and estranged from family, and trying to atone for his past. After mistaking Mira for his long lost daughter, he welcomes her presence in his life. Mira keeps returning as they kindle a surrogate father-daughter relationship, but the pretense falls when Kim’s real daughter (and Mira’s doppelgänger) shows up. Mira finds herself in an emotional crossfire that forces her to confront her own memories and feelings about her father.
I’m interested not only in the notion of fidelity as loyalty, but also as accuracy in representing (or copying) something or someone. This film is deeply rooted in questions and curiosities I engage with everyday. How do ruptured relationships affect how we carry ourselves in the world? How does technology, from art to AI, threaten and interrupt our interiority? How do we compartmentalize our identities that map onto the different stages of our lives?
The heart of the film is the relationship between Mira and Kim; a luckless actress orphaned since childhood who, as she’s turning 30, is still healing wounds left after losing her family; and Kim, a man whose priorities have led himself to live his last days alone. Theirs is a bond built on a false premise; but the fact that they keep returning to each other to play the roles of surrogate father and pretend daughter, is sufficient to make this the most meaningful, and healing, human connection they’ve each had.
I also believe it's especially timely to engage with the ways in which AI engines are actively invading our creative lives. From chatbots to digital avatar-superstars, to apps collecting our likenesses to serve us generated portraits in seconds, AI has made strides even in the past year.
I'm intrigued by our ongoing transition to a society mediated by artificial intelligence, and the ways in which we put faces on bots to make the transition less scary. What stories are we telling and changing? Whose faces are we using? And how does that relate to acting as we’ve known it for a century through cinema, or thousands of years through the stage?
We are rapidly moving toward principal photography in September. The screenplay is in its final stages of development through table reads in New York City, casting is in progress and almost all confirmed, and we are assembling a talented, diverse crew of collaborators, many of whom are working on their first feature film!
FIDELITY has the stirring interpersonal drama of THREE COLORS: RED meeting the elliptical narrative energy of HOLY MOTORS and the layered observation of grief of DRIVE MY CAR.
Making a film, at any scale, is a monumental collective effort driven by faith in a story and trust in the team bringing it to life. After developing the script through Filmshop, a nonprofit collective that counts FIDELITY’s director, producer, cinematographer and casting director as members, among others, we are ready to enter production in September.
Though we have already garnered in-kind support and are investing personal funds to get us to the starting line, we need your help to get us across the finish line. We are scheduled to shoot for 18 days in September, and are seeking additional funds to pay cast and crew, rent locations and equipment, buy meals and support everything else that goes into making a film.
Your contribution at any level will have an outsized impact on helping a scrappy and passionate group of filmmakers deliver a truly independent film.
We are all in solidarity with the WGA and SAG strikes fighting for better working conditions for all filmmakers. We are not affiliated with any struck companies and are abiding by agreements that allow independent productions to proceed. We are committed to withhold the release of the film for as long as the strikes continue, and will not be entering any distribution discussions until strikes have ceased.
Wishlist
Use the WishList to Pledge cash and Loan items - or - Make a pledge by selecting an Incentive directly.
Cast
Costs $4,000
We will ensure all cast members receive a fair wage for their work.
Crew
Costs $7,000
We will ensure all crew members receive a fair wage for their work.
Equipment
Costs $1,000
Camera and lighting equipment rentals to nail the look of our film!
Production Design
Costs $1,000
Set design, props, wardrobe - everything that goes into constructing the world of our film!
Locations
Costs $5,000
Securing the perfect locations to bring the script to life.
Craft Services
Costs $2,000
To keep our cast and crew fed during long shoot days!
Production Insurance
Costs $1,000
For the protection of our cast and crew, we must insure our production against any accidents.
Transportation
Costs $1,000
We need to transport our cast/crew to location and rent an equipment truck.
Post-Production
Costs $3,000
Visual effects, color grading, sound design - all the finishing touches!
Cash Pledge
Costs $0
Direct link:
Share this update!
About This Team
Roberto Drilea (writer-director-editor) is a Romanian-American writer-director based in Brooklyn. His work explores the intersection of the personal and political, how we relate to one another and to the technologies and systems we organize ourselves through. His short films have been presented at the Cannes Short Film Corner, and his short VR musical directed for Oculus “VR For Good” premiered at SXSW 2017. He was a 2016 Film graduate at Northwestern University, and has since apprenticed under directors including Lucrecia Martel, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Mikael Sodersten. FIDELITY is his debut as a writer-director.
Vadim Egoul (producer) is a filmmaker born in Kazakhstan and raised in Philadelphia. He directed, wrote and produced the short film WICKS, which premiered at the Coronado Island Film Festival where it won the Audience Award for Best Narrative Short. His latest short film, LOOKING UP, is a coming-of-age story of a Russian immigrant teen in mid-2000s Philadelphia. LOOKING UP premiered at the Big Apple Film Festival, where it was nominated for Best Narrative Short.
Junting Zhou (director of photography) is originally from Guangzhou, China and now lives in Queens, New York City. He graduated with an M.A in Media Studies from The New School in 2018 and is a self-taught digital cinematographer. Zhou has shot numerous independent narrative and documentary projects. In addition to his narrative work, Zhou has done freelance work for brands including Calvin Klein, Private Policy, Plane-Site, Dakoit Pictures, Ellemen China, Harper’s Bazaar China, and others.
Ellie Heyman (casting director) is a director of theater and film. Her work, known for its emotional depth with a visually imaginative aesthetic, won the Drama League Award for Outstanding Production in 2021 and has been nominated for Drama Desk, Lortel, Bessie and PGA Awards. Her piece, The Great Work Begins, featuring Glenn Close, Laura Linney, and Brian Tyree Henry, was named “Best of 2020” in the New York Times & New York Magazine. In addition to her work as a director, Ellie is a successful acting coach.
Catherine Dauphin as Mira/Sierra
A queer, mixed race actor, artist & filmmaker from London, with French-Vietnamese heritage. In 2020, her miniseries, What We Talk About When We Talk About Sex, was selected at Series Mania (Lille, France) and Seriencamp (Munich, Germany) Festivals. As an actress, she has been the lead of short films screened at the BFI London (UK), Tallinn Film Festival (Estonia), Luxembourg Film Festival, with smaller roles in feature films. FIDELITY is her first feature leading role.
Othello Pratt Jr. is a Bahamian- American multihyphenate Artist and Digital Creator by way of Harlem, NYC. He recently went viral on IG & Tiktok. Check him out @helloo_othello. Last seen in: Classical Theatre of Harlem's 12th Night, The Spot's Passover.
Andrew V. Ly is a Vietnamese-American actor based in Washington, DC. His stage credits include Mlima's Tale, The Rainmaker, and How the Light Gets In (all at 1st Stage in Tysons, VA). He holds degrees from Yale University (BA), the University of Southern California (MM), and the University of California, Berkeley (PhD). His honors include a Fulbright research fellowship to Austria and a Presidential Management Fellowship.
Sabrina Victor is a Haitian-American artist passionate about empowering all voices and using art to speak truth through performance activism. She is an actor, model, singer, and all-around creative based in New York and Boston. Sabrina currently attends Columbia University as a MFA Actor, and was last seen in 1776 with @americanrep.
Kennedy Carstens is an actress and songwriter living in NYC. Most recently you might have seen her as Anna of Cleves in Six the Musical or behind the mic at a PowerBush concert. If she's not in band rehearsal or behind the camera you might find her surfing at the beach or producing and coordinating events with Kennedy Carstens Events LLC.
Ethelyn Friend is a vocalist, actor and writer of original performance work. New York OFF-BROADWAY credits include Coal Country (Public Theater), Our Brother’s Son (Signature Theatre), Cassandra in Troilus and Cressida at Baryshnikov Arts (directed by Stephen Wangh with original music composed by Robert Een), developmental workshops with Tectonic Theater Project directed by Leigh Fondakowski (Casa Cushman opposite Cherry Jones, Spill). She played the title role in the musical Calamity! based on the life of Calamity Jane (Westword’s Best Actress in One-Woman Show”). She is also the creator of several critically acclaimed solo music-theatre productions produced by Judy Hussie-Taylor at BMOCA including Songs My Grandmothers Taught Me, My Ship, A Kurt Weill Cabaret, and Someone Else’s Dream, based on the songs of Thom Bishop & most recently How I Became White In America.
More cast announcements soon - follow our campaign for updates and follow us on IG @fidelitymovie
Current Team
Incentives
- The Story
- Wishlist
- Updates
- The Team
- Community
Mission Statement
The Story
At its heart, FIDELITY is about our unrelenting instinct to make sense of our past, and the fictions we are willing to live and die with.
The film centers on MIRA, a promising actress entering her 30s who questions her future as an artist. She takes an acting class with an overbearing coach, but a meaningful community of peers. She navigates gigs that are tangential to acting but not quite acting, like lending her likeness to an AI avatar for an educational app, or voicing children’s audiobooks - not the kind of work she had always dreamed about. At a career crossroads, pining for roles with more emotional depth, she finds an intriguing opportunity to stand in for the daughter of a terminally ill man.
That man is Kim, lonely and estranged from family, and trying to atone for his past. After mistaking Mira for his long lost daughter, he welcomes her presence in his life. Mira keeps returning as they kindle a surrogate father-daughter relationship, but the pretense falls when Kim’s real daughter (and Mira’s doppelgänger) shows up. Mira finds herself in an emotional crossfire that forces her to confront her own memories and feelings about her father.
I’m interested not only in the notion of fidelity as loyalty, but also as accuracy in representing (or copying) something or someone. This film is deeply rooted in questions and curiosities I engage with everyday. How do ruptured relationships affect how we carry ourselves in the world? How does technology, from art to AI, threaten and interrupt our interiority? How do we compartmentalize our identities that map onto the different stages of our lives?
The heart of the film is the relationship between Mira and Kim; a luckless actress orphaned since childhood who, as she’s turning 30, is still healing wounds left after losing her family; and Kim, a man whose priorities have led himself to live his last days alone. Theirs is a bond built on a false premise; but the fact that they keep returning to each other to play the roles of surrogate father and pretend daughter, is sufficient to make this the most meaningful, and healing, human connection they’ve each had.
I also believe it's especially timely to engage with the ways in which AI engines are actively invading our creative lives. From chatbots to digital avatar-superstars, to apps collecting our likenesses to serve us generated portraits in seconds, AI has made strides even in the past year.
I'm intrigued by our ongoing transition to a society mediated by artificial intelligence, and the ways in which we put faces on bots to make the transition less scary. What stories are we telling and changing? Whose faces are we using? And how does that relate to acting as we’ve known it for a century through cinema, or thousands of years through the stage?
We are rapidly moving toward principal photography in September. The screenplay is in its final stages of development through table reads in New York City, casting is in progress and almost all confirmed, and we are assembling a talented, diverse crew of collaborators, many of whom are working on their first feature film!
FIDELITY has the stirring interpersonal drama of THREE COLORS: RED meeting the elliptical narrative energy of HOLY MOTORS and the layered observation of grief of DRIVE MY CAR.
Making a film, at any scale, is a monumental collective effort driven by faith in a story and trust in the team bringing it to life. After developing the script through Filmshop, a nonprofit collective that counts FIDELITY’s director, producer, cinematographer and casting director as members, among others, we are ready to enter production in September.
Though we have already garnered in-kind support and are investing personal funds to get us to the starting line, we need your help to get us across the finish line. We are scheduled to shoot for 18 days in September, and are seeking additional funds to pay cast and crew, rent locations and equipment, buy meals and support everything else that goes into making a film.
Your contribution at any level will have an outsized impact on helping a scrappy and passionate group of filmmakers deliver a truly independent film.
We are all in solidarity with the WGA and SAG strikes fighting for better working conditions for all filmmakers. We are not affiliated with any struck companies and are abiding by agreements that allow independent productions to proceed. We are committed to withhold the release of the film for as long as the strikes continue, and will not be entering any distribution discussions until strikes have ceased.
Wishlist
Use the WishList to Pledge cash and Loan items - or - Make a pledge by selecting an Incentive directly.
Cast
Costs $4,000
We will ensure all cast members receive a fair wage for their work.
Crew
Costs $7,000
We will ensure all crew members receive a fair wage for their work.
Equipment
Costs $1,000
Camera and lighting equipment rentals to nail the look of our film!
Production Design
Costs $1,000
Set design, props, wardrobe - everything that goes into constructing the world of our film!
Locations
Costs $5,000
Securing the perfect locations to bring the script to life.
Craft Services
Costs $2,000
To keep our cast and crew fed during long shoot days!
Production Insurance
Costs $1,000
For the protection of our cast and crew, we must insure our production against any accidents.
Transportation
Costs $1,000
We need to transport our cast/crew to location and rent an equipment truck.
Post-Production
Costs $3,000
Visual effects, color grading, sound design - all the finishing touches!
Cash Pledge
Costs $0
Direct link:
Share this update!
About This Team
Roberto Drilea (writer-director-editor) is a Romanian-American writer-director based in Brooklyn. His work explores the intersection of the personal and political, how we relate to one another and to the technologies and systems we organize ourselves through. His short films have been presented at the Cannes Short Film Corner, and his short VR musical directed for Oculus “VR For Good” premiered at SXSW 2017. He was a 2016 Film graduate at Northwestern University, and has since apprenticed under directors including Lucrecia Martel, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Mikael Sodersten. FIDELITY is his debut as a writer-director.
Vadim Egoul (producer) is a filmmaker born in Kazakhstan and raised in Philadelphia. He directed, wrote and produced the short film WICKS, which premiered at the Coronado Island Film Festival where it won the Audience Award for Best Narrative Short. His latest short film, LOOKING UP, is a coming-of-age story of a Russian immigrant teen in mid-2000s Philadelphia. LOOKING UP premiered at the Big Apple Film Festival, where it was nominated for Best Narrative Short.
Junting Zhou (director of photography) is originally from Guangzhou, China and now lives in Queens, New York City. He graduated with an M.A in Media Studies from The New School in 2018 and is a self-taught digital cinematographer. Zhou has shot numerous independent narrative and documentary projects. In addition to his narrative work, Zhou has done freelance work for brands including Calvin Klein, Private Policy, Plane-Site, Dakoit Pictures, Ellemen China, Harper’s Bazaar China, and others.
Ellie Heyman (casting director) is a director of theater and film. Her work, known for its emotional depth with a visually imaginative aesthetic, won the Drama League Award for Outstanding Production in 2021 and has been nominated for Drama Desk, Lortel, Bessie and PGA Awards. Her piece, The Great Work Begins, featuring Glenn Close, Laura Linney, and Brian Tyree Henry, was named “Best of 2020” in the New York Times & New York Magazine. In addition to her work as a director, Ellie is a successful acting coach.
Catherine Dauphin as Mira/Sierra
A queer, mixed race actor, artist & filmmaker from London, with French-Vietnamese heritage. In 2020, her miniseries, What We Talk About When We Talk About Sex, was selected at Series Mania (Lille, France) and Seriencamp (Munich, Germany) Festivals. As an actress, she has been the lead of short films screened at the BFI London (UK), Tallinn Film Festival (Estonia), Luxembourg Film Festival, with smaller roles in feature films. FIDELITY is her first feature leading role.
Othello Pratt Jr. is a Bahamian- American multihyphenate Artist and Digital Creator by way of Harlem, NYC. He recently went viral on IG & Tiktok. Check him out @helloo_othello. Last seen in: Classical Theatre of Harlem's 12th Night, The Spot's Passover.
Andrew V. Ly is a Vietnamese-American actor based in Washington, DC. His stage credits include Mlima's Tale, The Rainmaker, and How the Light Gets In (all at 1st Stage in Tysons, VA). He holds degrees from Yale University (BA), the University of Southern California (MM), and the University of California, Berkeley (PhD). His honors include a Fulbright research fellowship to Austria and a Presidential Management Fellowship.
Sabrina Victor is a Haitian-American artist passionate about empowering all voices and using art to speak truth through performance activism. She is an actor, model, singer, and all-around creative based in New York and Boston. Sabrina currently attends Columbia University as a MFA Actor, and was last seen in 1776 with @americanrep.
Kennedy Carstens is an actress and songwriter living in NYC. Most recently you might have seen her as Anna of Cleves in Six the Musical or behind the mic at a PowerBush concert. If she's not in band rehearsal or behind the camera you might find her surfing at the beach or producing and coordinating events with Kennedy Carstens Events LLC.
Ethelyn Friend is a vocalist, actor and writer of original performance work. New York OFF-BROADWAY credits include Coal Country (Public Theater), Our Brother’s Son (Signature Theatre), Cassandra in Troilus and Cressida at Baryshnikov Arts (directed by Stephen Wangh with original music composed by Robert Een), developmental workshops with Tectonic Theater Project directed by Leigh Fondakowski (Casa Cushman opposite Cherry Jones, Spill). She played the title role in the musical Calamity! based on the life of Calamity Jane (Westword’s Best Actress in One-Woman Show”). She is also the creator of several critically acclaimed solo music-theatre productions produced by Judy Hussie-Taylor at BMOCA including Songs My Grandmothers Taught Me, My Ship, A Kurt Weill Cabaret, and Someone Else’s Dream, based on the songs of Thom Bishop & most recently How I Became White In America.
More cast announcements soon - follow our campaign for updates and follow us on IG @fidelitymovie