Amid chaotic Thanksgiving preparations, a teenager schemes to prevent her family from discovering that she might have given them chlamydia before dinner is served.

Director’s Vision for ‘Dirty’

As a kid, I never understood why my hands looked like an eighty-year-old’s during the wintertime. Eventually, I realized that my compulsive hand-washing was an early hint of an ordinary case of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). Every horrid flash of something terrible happening to me or my family, I’d wash the thought away with soap and water, ritualistically counting 1,2, 3…. 1, 2, 3… And when sex came into the picture, my hypochondria nose-dived for the worse. The abstract concept of physical intimacy grew into an ever changing question mark between pleasure and consequence.

I made Dirty because my intrusive thoughts told me not to. Kids my age were engaging in the naive joys of adolescence while I was on a nightmare carousel of my own imagination. At a certain point, I had to confront A) the impressiveness in the originality of my cruel imagination and B) how ridiculous I looked trying to stop all these false premonitions from occurring – all in the name of staying ‘clean,’ whatever that means… But that in itself is a perfect formula for comedy: absurdity in suffering. I really hope this short can be simultaneously entertaining, and for the millions of people also coping with OCD, a reminder that the cycle of torment can only end when you decide it does.