CROWDFUNDING
2024 · 12m · UK
Directed by Florian Kasperski
Tones: darkly comic, tender, tense
Maya attempts to record a crowdfunding video for her bakery while in the midst of a full nervous breakdown, turning a mundane digital task into a pressure-cooker one-woman performance piece.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Kasperski found the exact right modern form for performance anxiety — the self-promotional video where the mask keeps slipping — and built a whole film inside that gap between who Maya needs to be and who she actually is in this moment.
Performative crowdfunding video genre as vessel for breakdown — that's a sharp formal idea, and the format-of-the-moment specificity is exactly what good shorts do. Curious.
The crowdfunding video — a genre of performative optimism — as container for a genuine psychological unraveling is a properly contemporary structural choice. Single-take one-woman pressure-cooker filmmaking lives or dies on the performer; can't tell from the Vimeo metadata.