Private Project

Real Love


Real love is a short film about Adina, a woman trying to find true love. She begins the story on a date with a beautiful woman, Penelope.
Penelope is interested and obliging and she literally changes to meet Adina’s desires. As the date continues we realize that things are not quite as they seem and when Penelope beckons Adina for a kiss, the world is revealed for what it is. Adina is at home, alone, in her bathrobe with a VR set as her only company.

  • Emma Williamson
    Director
  • Yasmine Alice
    Writer
    The Truckman, Future Soldier, Anxious
  • Larissa Bonaci
    Producer
  • Yasmine Alice
    Producer
    The Truckman, Future Soldier, Anxious
  • Yasmine Alice
    Key Cast
    "Penelope"
    The Truckman, Future Soldier, Anxious
  • Larissa Bonaci
    Key Cast
    "Adina"
  • Project Type:
    Short
  • Genres:
    Sci-fi, Romance
  • Runtime:
    1 minute
  • Completion Date:
    February 14, 2023
  • Production Budget:
    100 GBP
  • Country of Origin:
    United Kingdom
  • Country of Filming:
    United Kingdom
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • London
    United Kingdom
    February 24, 2023
    Raindance - Valentine's Day Competition, 2nd runner up
Director Biography - Emma Williamson

Emma Williamson (she/her) is an award winning, working class, writer and director from Northern Ireland. Her films have screened internationally at BAFTA and OSCAR affiliated festivals. Her screenwriting and directing has been funded by The National Lottery, the BFI and Malta Screen. Emma is a previous winner of the Northern Ireland Screen’s New Writer Focus and has been short-listed for the BBC Writersroom.

During her directing career Emma has worked with BAFTA nominated actors and upcoming stars like Alexa Davies, Louisa Harland and Kingsley Ben Adir. She is a member of this year's Filmonomics cohort, a British Film Institute backed accelerator program, aimed at supporting emerging female directors produce their first feature film. When Emma is not directing or developing her own practice she works as a script reader for Lift-Off Film Festival and Rianne Reads - a program supporting the writing of female or female-identifying script writers. Her work focuses primarily on telling the stories of underrepresented groups, especially those from low-socioeconomic backgrounds. She is influenced heavily by the work of Andrea Arnold, Jane Campion, Aoife McArdle and Ken Loach.

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Director Statement

The aim of this film is to raise questions about what the world of AI offers us in intimate relationships. It is an exploration of this, including but not limited to, the ethics of being able to control and change our romantic counterpart. What does that tell our psyche when we engage with the real world? And what is the implication for our emotional state when we leave a digital world? For this reason, the tone of this film is everything, it could easily have slipped into full comedy but instead, creatively, we have pitched it ambiguously to really address these earlier questions. Even in the more easily comic moments of the film, this has been played for its pathos as much as it’s humour. Aesthetically the film is heavily influenced by the works of Wong Kar Wai and Steve McQueen, mixing warm romantic tones with clinical blues. From saturation of colour to the absence of this is to replicate the absence of comfort and self-soothing that our lead character experiences in the AI world.