No.1

NARRATIVE SHORT

MAY 23, 2023

USA | 10 minutes | 2021

Sci-fi, thriller short film directed by Healin Kweon
Starring Mai Khuu, Rachel Keaton

A young woman gets a call from the future informing her death in 60 minutes, but is told to do the same thing as she was planning to do that day.

Director’s Statement

Thanks to my father who was an early adopter, I used to be one of those lucky kids who first got to use the latest technology. I remember being the first kid to have a touch screen phone in elementary school. After a few days of showing off my state-of-the-art product, I noticed a huge inconvenience of this phone. Every time I put my phone in my pocket or bag something happened unintentionally. Sometimes a message would be sent by itself or a photo suddenly got deleted. Since this was the early stages of touch screen technologies, my phone screen was activated with any object. I got to realize at a young age that the latest technologies tend to be the most user-unfriendly ones.

Most sci-fi movies tend to show all these highly advanced technology causing problems. However, I believe we might be living in the most uncomfortable and troublesome digital era compared to the far future. When most of the sci-fi films focus on the completed technology causing sociological and moral problems, I wanted to tell the stories about the progress of getting there. I’ve seen a lot of perspectives of how the accomplishment of time travelling affected the society and created new types of crimes. I have always been interested in how the society would gradually adapt to new technology as it gets developed. What would the world be like when time travelling gets invented but is in the early stage where only voice can travel time? I strongly believe people would still try to utilize this uncompleted technology as much as they can right away.

This film was inspired by Steven Spielberg’s “Minority Report.” A sci-fi action movie based in a future where a special police unit is able to arrest murderers before they commit their crimes. The film is about an officer from that unit and is himself accused of the future murder of a man that he has not met yet. After watching this thought-provoking film about using foreknowledge to prevent future crimes, I was captured with the thought of “How many people would accept to be locked up for a crime they never committed?”. It would take a few decades to change the perspective towards this idea. This is where my film idea comes in. With the ability to travel time with voice, so many unsolved cases can be solved and prevented by using the past records. I started imagining using this technology to solve crimes, especially serial murder cases. However, even with the exact information people will not be able to accept arresting a person in advance in our time. Therefore, a single crime must be committed inevitably to give the justification of the arrest. My film is about the incident of this inevitable single case that has to happen. While watching this film I want the viewers to experience the same process of doubt the main character experiences. Until the end, both the audience and main character realize the future call was an insurance to make sure she meets the killer for a testimony.

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Credits

Director, Writer, Editor: Healin Kweon
Producers: Po Wei Su, Healin Kweon
Cinematographer: Sophie Gemelas
Also starring: Marie Kelli, Alejandro G. Charles, Jerry Schultz, Cari Keebaugh