SelfTape falls in the genre of “split personality” stories, like the 1976 movie Sybil and the classic R.L. Stevenson tale, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, among others. In the instance of SelfTape, the dissociated identities have become lost to one another and are seeking to reintegrate.
In the opening scene the heroine, a beautiful young woman named Sasha, is on the verge of giving up her acting career. She has that day been dropped by her talent agency because after her most recent audition, the feedback her agent receives from the casting director is, “She was saying her words but she wasn’t getting the love.” And Sasha knows that the critique is true: some unknown thing buried inside her is keeping her alienated from her own emotional wellsprings. Alone at home with her only close companion, a “dinobaby” plush toy she has kept since childhood, she pleads for an angel to come and save her. Sasha will record one last audition selftape the next day and then, expecting another failure, she anticipates the end of her career.
The next morning she is “photo-mugged” on a busy Beverly Hills street by a very aggressive female paparazza who mistakes Sasha for a well-known movie star. Over the course of the story the paparazza is revealed to be the angel Sasha had prayed for. Moreover, having for years led a life of endless wandering on long-distance buses, and uncertain of just who or what she herself is, in the course of the story the paparazza finds she is deeply connected to Sasha, can even access memories from Sasha’s childhood, yearns to “come home” to her…cares for her. The paparazza leads Sasha to revisit in her mind the soul-murdering cruelty Sasha’s mother had visited upon her when Sasha was a teen-ager, causing Sasha’s identity to shatter. She goads Sasha to let go of the fears and injuries of the past so she can better embrace her future. And the paparazza does this to save not only Sasha but also herself, for she is the part of Sasha that had fractured and split off years before, shepherding the most fragile parts of Sasha’s being away from further harm, but at the price that this emotional sequestration has left Sasha numb. At the climax of the story Sasha and the paparazza-angel reintegrate. Sasha records her audition selftape and this time—finally—she is on fire. She’s getting the love in a way no talent agent or casting director could ever mistake. Nor can we.
Reduced to its dramatic essence, SelfTape’s core idea is that there are angels alive within us who have the power to heal us.
Directed by Rob Freedman (USA)