DIRECTORS' STATEMENT
We are 24-year-old identical twins born to South Asian immigrant parents (father Bangladeshi, mother Indian) and raised in Pompton Lakes, a small, white, working-class town in New Jersey.
Quickly we learned how skin color impacts perceptions. We were outsiders from the get-go: marginalization seemed to limit our abilities to thrive academically and socially; we felt like our lives were “determined” by our ethnicity. Often, we felt gravity tugging at us to roll over and surrender to the stereotype. But more often, we had an undying urge to breakthrough these invisible barriers and prove everyone wrong.
When we entered our first year of college in a predominately African American branch campus of Penn State, we realized we were not alone with our identity issues. Many students shared the same struggles. A few kids we got to know internalized the glamorization of gangsters — or “Gs,” as they are called on campus — and dreamed of a "thug life" to prove their “authenticity.” Brandishing a label helped ease their pain. Their path inspired our screenplay, in that it located a struggle parallel to our own.
Never were we able to “go with” the stereotype that people tried to imprint on us. And the more we delved into issues of identity, the more we thought about determinism and free will. Can race, class, and ethnicity determine the outcome of one’s life? Are people truly free or are they bound by past and present circumstances? Which factors are outside our control and which, if any, are pre-determined? How much of a role does one’s own psychology take in fueling feelings of being “The Other”?
Thematically, DETERMINISM — embodied by Alec's character — represents the struggle to control one’s destiny. Rejecting his computer technology major and deliberately flunking out of the fictitious Burroughs University, Alec, an alienated university student of South Asian descent, rebels against what everyone, including his father, foisted upon him. Triggered by the collapse of his family’s finances, Alec tosses off the invisible shackles of longstanding virtual confinement and sets out to defeat the philosophy of determinism — by any means necessary.
Cinematically we went for an expressionistic visual style using spare production design, panoramic wide shots, and high contrast lighting to create the oppressive, lifeless vistas of the fictitious town of Narakaville. Cultural motifs provide a metaphor for modern purgatory: college students walking uniformly through campus, an environment constructed from spare indistinguishable locations — sterile apartments within cookie-cutter housing complexes — and an atmosphere pervaded by an overriding sense of isolation, claustrophobia, and rigid conformity: Narakaville reflects the social, psychological, and emotional prison Alec must bust out of in order to find his spirit.
