Our Own Little World

When Elle finally meets her internet best friends in person, their limited time together forces her to appreciate the beauties of the present while confronting the grief of their eventual separation.

  • Reyna Hughes
    Director
  • Reyna Hughes
    Writer
  • Callista Brand
    Producer
  • Reyna Hughes
    Producer
  • Elaine Cho
    Key Cast
    "Veyda"
  • Sofia Maldonado
    Key Cast
    "Liz"
  • Callista Brand
    Key Cast
    "Elle"
  • Nicole DeLong
    Director of Photography
  • Aditi Arya
    Sound Recordist
  • Juliet Bornholdt
    Gaffer
  • Callista Brand
    Assistant Director
  • Reyna Hughes
    Editor
  • Project Type:
    Short, Student
  • Genres:
    Mumblecore, Coming of Age
  • Runtime:
    18 minutes
  • Completion Date:
    April 21, 2025
  • Country of Origin:
    United States
  • Country of Filming:
    United States
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital, URSA
  • Aspect Ratio:
    1.85:1
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    Yes
  • Student Project:
    Yes - University of Michigan
Director Biography - Reyna Hughes

Reyna Hughes is a Filipino-American writer/director/editor from Detroit, Michigan. After editing her own trailers for her favorite movies as a kid and being immersed in cinema at her local movie theater job, Reyna decided to study film at the University of Michigan. There, she was a part of the screenwriting program under the mentorship of Academy Award winning Writer/Director Kemp Powers (Soul, One Night in Miami), where she wrote her feature script Midnight in Manila, a horror film about Filipino folklore.

Her recent work includes a montage-style sizzle reel titled “Women in Film”, in which she won the award for “Best Editing” at an Ann Arbor Film Festival in 2024. In October of 2024, she was the assistant director for the University of Michigan Honors Thesis film “I Am Josephine”. She has additional experience in the film industry working as a sports videographer and video editor for the Michigan Women’s soccer and volleyball teams, and also worked with her University’s Documentary program where she developed documentary pitches on local non-profit stories. Reyna was also the co-President of her University’s Film and Video Association and was in charge of the Lightworks Film Festival, where she coordinated a panel of judges, programmed the lineup of films, and was the host/presenter. Most recently, she was the writer/director of a mumblecore-inspired short film titled “In Our Own Little World”.

Her work primarily focuses on the complexity of her experiences as a queer Filipino-American, where she aims to bring positive and empowering representations of those identities onto the screen. She loves utilizing the language of genre-filmmaking to communicate these complexities, specifically through screenwriting within the horror and coming of age genres.

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Director Statement

During a summer in college, I decided to meet up with my two friends that I had only known online. It was what we had been building up to for years, but nothing could have prepared me for the amount of grief, existentialism, and catharsis I felt during our time together – I still feel it today.

“In Our Own Little World” is an exploration of those exact feelings – I wanted to explore the small, quiet moments we take for granted with the people in our lives that we see everyday. After knowing what life was like spending time with them in person, I thought it would be impossible to have to return to being thousands of miles away and in different time zones, and I found myself dwelling on if it would ever happen again. However, I got to see one of them again during a spontaneous trip to their state- good things just take a little time. This film navigates wishing for your reality to be different, and the journey to finally seeing the beauty in your own unique path.

I’ve found that films about online friendship almost always frame it in a negative light, with young girls getting catfished by male stalkers, and most of the time, this isn’t the case – I needed to show the beauty in connecting with someone an ocean away from you. That somewhere, somehow, something aligned in the stars for you to become friends with this person against time and space.

This film is a love letter to the Mumblecore genre of film and the slice-of-life films by Greta Gerwig– I’m particularly inspired by Gerwig’s honesty and raw, human vulnerability that comes out in her writing and directing, that makes me not only fall in love with cinema, but the human experience. By utilizing the conventions of Mumblecore, the natural, raw, and real connections you can have with internet friends are able to come to life through the genre’s tradition of monologues, improvisation, and dialogue-driven stories. There’s so much to be said about this unique friendship dynamic, and mumbling serves as a telephone line into the hearts of audiences.