The Plagiarists

A slippery satire in the guise of an ultra lo-fi American indie, THE PLAGIARISTS hilariously plays upon contemporary social insecurities around race, gender, and relationships, even as it  meditates on questions of sincerity, authorship, and memory. Would- be novelist Anna and her filmmaker boyfriend Tyler are a young  millennial couple who find themselves stranded on a weekend to Upstate New York; Clip, an older African American man played by Parliament-Funkadelic’s Michael “Clip” Payne, helps and befriends them. Months later, a chance discovery forces the couple to reevaluate the ambiguities of Clip’s life and the brief evening they spent with him, fraying their own connection and revealing their own anxieties and petty uncertainties. Shot with the rough, pixellated imagery of a vintage television camera – explicitly recalling and parodying the “raw” aesthetic of Dogme 95 – THE PLAGIARISTS is a fiercely intelligent comedy that operates on multiple levels, one that mixes wildly different acting registers (professional and non-professional, broad and subtle), and veers imperceptibly between the deep-fake and the hyper-real. (Leo Goldsmith)

In the presence of Paul Dallas (producer).