FIDELITY

When Mira, a luckless young actress in New York, lands the most important role of her life for an audience of one - pretending to be the long-lost daughter of a terminally ill man - she learns how deeply fiction can unsettle the truth, as she is confronted by memories of her own disappeared father.

  • Roberto Drilea
    Director
  • Roberto Drilea
    Writer
  • Vadim Egoul
    Producer
  • Roberto Drilea
    Producer
  • Catherine Dauphin
    Key Cast
    "Mira"
  • Thom Sesma
    Key Cast
    "Vinh Khiem"
  • Ethelyn Friend
    Key Cast
    "Ludmila"
  • Alex Hernandez
    Key Cast
    "Joel"
  • Sabrina Victor
    Key Cast
    "Valerie"
  • Christopher Bannow
    Key Cast
    "Mark"
  • Maxim Bouffard
    Key Cast
    "Turpin"
  • Kennedy Carstens
    Key Cast
    "Ava"
  • Ysaias Garcia
    Key Cast
    "Elias"
  • Margaret Dunn
    Key Cast
    "Elena"
  • Dina Zhanybekova
    Key Cast
    "Sara"
  • Othello Pratt Jr.
    Key Cast
    "Samuel"
  • Josephine Chiang
    Key Cast
    "Mother"
  • Olivia Rui Mishima
    Key Cast
    "Young Mira"
  • Andrew Ly
    Key Cast
    "Mira's Father"
  • Tania Chelnov
    Key Cast
    "Agent"
  • Frankie Cassingham
    Key Cast
    "Apollo"
  • Jun-ting Zhou
    Director of Photography
  • Abraham Chan
    Production Design
  • Salma Amer
    Art Director
  • Kaia Shi
    Hair/Make-up (Key)
  • Ellie Heyman
    Casting Director
  • Roberto Drilea
    Editor
  • Project Type:
    Feature
  • Genres:
    Psychological Drama, Drama
  • Runtime:
    1 hour 19 minutes
  • Completion Date:
    September 6, 2024
  • Production Budget:
    55,000 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    United States, United States
  • Country of Filming:
    United States, United States
  • Language:
    English, Vietnamese
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    3:2
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    Yes
  • Student Project:
    No
Director Biography - Roberto Drilea

Roberto Drilea is a Romanian-American filmmaker based in New York.

Working across narrative, documentary, and VR, he has created short-form work that has premiered at festivals including SXSW and Reykjavik.

He studied film at Northwestern University and has since apprenticed under directors including Lucrecia Martel and Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

FIDELITY is his feature debut as a writer-director.

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Director Statement

FIDELITY examines our relationship with images and the narratives shaping our connections. Through three intersecting storylines, centered on an underemployed Asian-American actress searching for meaning, connection, and self-discovery, the film creates a timely psychological drama that questions which stories help us and which harm us.

This is my first feature as a writer-director. Made with a five-figure budget and many favors, FIDELITY was developed in collaboration with Catherine Dauphin, the French-Vietnamese actress who plays Mira and Sierra. The film began after we met in a 2022 workshop led by Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul (MEMORIA, UNCLE BOONMEE), and grew out of shared questions about the mystical nature of performance and the challenges of creating art in a society that continues to devalue it.

I believe acting is the heart of cinema, so I was particularly intrigued to tackle questions about acting in the age of AI. Cinema and drama don't exist without performance, but as an actor, your existence becomes somewhat secondary to your image. Once you're recognizable, people see you as a character first, and a person second—a kind of shell. That duality intrigued me and became a key theme in this film.

I’m also fascinated by our shift to a society increasingly mediated by AI. AI, though long embedded in our lives, is advancing rapidly, often in unsettling ways. To make it less intimidating, we put human faces on it—educational bots wrapped in deepfake avatars, holograms at airports, customer chat heads on websites. But who are these people lending their likenesses? And what happens when their images, initially used with consent, are repurposed?

Exploring these questions felt particularly poignant with an actress on the cusp—someone experienced but not yet recognizable, someone just committing to acting as a career. What does it mean to dedicate one’s life to acting—or any art? I think, among other things, it means to commit oneself to the notion that, as humans, perhaps we can't really handle the truth directly. That’s a notion I share as a fiction-maker, as a director. We make painful truths more palatable by wrapping them in lies. We need art to hold our hands as we experience the depths of our own feelings.

If making a film is a miracle, getting it seen is an entirely new challenge. I hope you will consider programming our unusual film, one made with limited resources but filled with heart and hope for cinema’s ability to keep us in touch with our humanity.

Sincerely,
Roberto Drilea