After moving into a newly renovated apartment, Rory’s life falls apart when a mysterious man appears in his home.
Director’s Vision for ‘You Can’t Talk to The Dude’
I’ve only ever lived in neighborhoods where I didn’t belong.
It’s part of the modern urban experience, where rising cost of living has forced many of us to seek housing in neighborhoods not built for us, and where we find ourselves part of the exact process that is changing every city across the country, across the world, into a similar kind of place. Within these neighborhoods, we live our lives, make our homes, fall in love, fall out of love, find our ‘spots’, and make a life. But always, we know, this land was not meant for us, not meant for the lives we have built on top of this.
The idea for this short came to me nearly a decade ago, when I moved into my first apartment in New York City, in a neighborhood still predominantly occupied by its Ecuadorian, Dominican and Polish populations, but that would soon come to be the hottest new spot for trendy couples to move to. There was a ghostly quality to my life in those days, peculiarly aware that my presence amongst my neighbors was exactly the herald of the end of the days when block parties and barbecues, street vendors and stoop hangs reigned supreme. I tried to be as good a neighbor as I could be, help those I could help, patron the stores owned by locals, but it was never about my actions, only my presence. My daily life felt less real, more immaterial and as if, at any moment, I could simply disappear.
It felt like, at any moment, the apartment’s real owner would come back and remind me that my silly little life didn’t amount to much, that I had no place here. I’d get a tingling, nagging fear in the back of my head every time I left my apartment, as if, even if I was only gone for a minute, I would come back to find my space occupied by someone else.
This short is the culmination of many years of thinking about my experiences living in cities, living on top of each other, and dealing with the hard pain of change. The short is about many things but ultimately it is about how we deal with the immutable law of the universe; all things go. How do we deal with the things we cannot explain? How do we deal with those who do not speak back? How do we deal with the fact that our lives are not ours to determine?
