Share

I have written Share to talk about the huge part social media plays in our lives today. The immediate inspiration for the story was the online backlash, ruthless and cruel, that the singer Natalia Kills received for being rude to a contestant on New Zealand’s X Factor where she was a judge in 2015. The amount of hate and malice she received was hugely disproportionate in comparison to what she did. This made me wonder about how on the internet there is a code of conduct, with everyone being supportive, spreading positive vibes and believing that ‘if you have nothing nice to say, don’t say anything’. However, ‘cancel culture’ also exists, meaning that whenever a public person is branded as evil, rightfully or not, that someone becomes a target of insane mass hatred. As if being nice and positive was just a slick facade, and in reality we are waiting for an approval to unload all the negative energy on somebody. Which I think is true to an extent, because social media, as beneficial as it is, does make us feel inadequate at times, and simultaneously entices us with instant love and understanding if we upload the right content. And from that it is just a step to creating an online alter ego by not showing the whole truth or lying, which can heavily influence our life in the real world.

Another theme of the story is friendship, and how it works on social media versus reality. This aspect of the script evolved during production thanks to the two actresses playing the two main roles, Mia Lacostena playing Elizabeth and Irina Leoncio playing Diana. In the story, their characters act like friends but are really enemies, and in real life Mia and Irina actually are life-long friends. We have ended up incorporating social media pictures of them together from over the years into the film. It turned out to fit the message and the whole film perfectly, hopefully elevating the emotional impact.

I believe me and the entire cast and crew or Share are the perfect group of people to tell this story - we are all in late 20s and early 30s, we grew up without the internet and got introduced to it in our teens. We are completely immersed in social media now, but we remember life without it.

I hope the audience will laugh when watching the film, get a bit emotional too, and maybe even reexamine their relationship with social media. But most of all, I hope that no matter how ridiculous or ugly the characters get as the story progresses, they still evoke sympathy and empathy.