"The greatest disease in the West today is not TB or leprosy; it is being unwanted, unloved, and uncared for. We can cure physical diseases with medicine, but the only cure for loneliness, despair, and hopelessness is love... The poverty in the West is a different kind of poverty -- it is not only a poverty of loneliness but also of spirituality. There's a hunger for love, as there is a hunger for God.” -- Mother Teresa (sorry!!)

Petra wants to be loved. She wants to be chosen. She has decided that there is no one on Planet Earth who will pick her. This is how the story begins.

It starts with Petra's morning routine:

After unwrapping her face, dunking her face into a bowl of ice water, guasha, jade rolling, injecting peptides, taking her blood pressure and her body measurements; she then has a zoom appointment with a nutritionist where she gets irritated that her menstrual cycle is still unpredictable and rejects the idea of birth control. She then heads to her private training session with her Muay Thai instructor whose validation she craves, vigorously hits pads, and secures a hook-up for later that day with the hot guy who is training after her (who only notices her today after she pours an entire bottle of water over hear head and asks him out while she is soaking wet).

She heads to her mother's house to say goodbye to her family. Not that they notice her or even care. She heads to the hot guy's house, almost hooks up with him then doesn't, saying she has to save herself for the aliens. She goes to the UFO pickup point (a huge soccer field on Randall's Island) and waits. While waiting another woman arrives to the field. The UFO flies above Petra's head, hovers there for a moment, but then flies off and picks up the other woman instead. She gets lifted into the air by a beam of light. Petra watches and waits. It picks up someone else in the distance. She waits so long she gets old.

Last year I read this book called Abduction that details people's experiences being abducted by aliens and/or encounters with UFO's. I went into my professor's office joking that I was salty that the aliens weren't choosing me and then rationalized that maybe I wasn't a viable candidate for their breeding program because I have PCOS which can affect fertility. My professor said, great, write that story! I obviously said no and here we are many months later and it's the premise for my thesis film.

the book that incited the incident:To me, this is a comedy, but there is something in the ending of the film that is evocative and sad. For many years now I have had an obsession with having perfect skin and a history of body and face dysmorphia. These are also related to beliefs I have that if something is wrong with my skin then I am not worth loving. (Everyone has their own version of these beliefs.) I have dreams and ambitions that have nothing to do with what I look like and yet thinking about my face and body take up a lot of my mental energy. I am interested in telling stories about women in this condition: smart, interesting, weird, and funny, but spending way too much of their mental energies fixated on something that is ridiculous but comes from a deep place of longing for a place in the world.

Petra (me) doing Muay ThaiPetra doesn't feel like she belongs on Planet Earth and she needs to get off. Why shouldn't she go out in middle of the night to the spot the UFO might be and wait to get picked up? Why stay?

The money we raise from this campaign is crucial for this film. Anything we raise over the amount would help to pay for post-production, including the VFX budget for the UFO. Thank you for reading ❤️