Experiencing Interruptions?

Tenure

When a dedicated college professor is denied tenure, he turns to black magic in a moment of desperation but finds himself trapped in a private hell of his own making.

  • Sebastien Basset
    Director
  • Sebastien Basset
    Writer
  • Sebastien Basset
    Producer
  • Laurent Basset
    Co-Producer
  • Kimia Kazemi
    Executive Producer
  • E. Sean Griffin
    Key Cast
    "Paul Rennick"
  • Andra Nechita
    Key Cast
    "Margot"
  • Raz Fritz
    Key Cast
    "Chris Shaw"
  • David Bickford
    Key Cast
    "Kurzmann"
  • Jeremy Basset
    Cinematographer
  • Alexander Arntzen
    Music by
  • Karen Basset
    Sound Editor
  • Project Type:
    Short
  • Genres:
    Surrealism, Psychological, horror, drama
  • Runtime:
    14 minutes 11 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    July 8, 2024
  • Production Budget:
    4,000 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    United States
  • Country of Filming:
    United States
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    2.39:1
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    Yes
  • Student Project:
    No
Director Biography - Sebastien Basset

Sebastien Basset is a French-American screenwriter and filmmaker based in Los Angeles, California. He left a promising career path in government to pursue his passion for film and filmmaking shortly after beginning college in 2016. In 2017, he completed his first spec feature screenplay "Arctic Patrol," and has written more than 20 spec screenplays and treatments in the years since. He graduated from UCLA with a B.A. in Political Science and a minor in Film, Television, and Digital Media in 2020. Since 2023, he has worked on the producing team on several top baking competition series for Food Network. Also in 2023, he began production of his first short film "Tenure." His work draws inspiration from his experience in municipal government and his French-American dual cultural identity.

Add Director Biography
Director Statement

As a second-generation French-American and first-generation college graduate, it felt necessary for me to break the mold in a family of musicians and film industry artists by pursuing a career outside of the arts. In 2016 after leaving high school and entering college, I was firmly set in a career path in government.

I began my studies in political science in community college, and did a year-long internship at the Los Angeles City Council. During this time, as an aside, I began personal studies into film and started screenwriting. Quickly, all my free time was spent writing screenplays. After I completed my first spec feature screenplay, I quickly became disillusioned with the idea of working in government and politics and set my sights solely on film. As soon as I transferred to UCLA as a junior, I started work on a minor in Film, Television, and Digital Media. Once that passion took hold, I never looked back.

"Tenure" is my first film.

"Tenure" began life in 2018 as a short script titled "The Iron Cage," a dialectical story which focused on the abstract nature of crime and punishment in a totalitarian state. When the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020, production on the "The Iron Cage" was stopped shortly before filming began but after a series of camera tests had been completed with my brother, cinematographer Jeremy Basset. We experimented with low-key lighting and in-camera tricks to create interesting, minimalist mise-en-scene inspired by German Expressionism and classic film noir.

By 2023, a renewed desire to produce "The Iron Cage" saw the script reimagined from the ground up. At the time, university admissions and plagiarism scandals were rocking universities across the United States, and from that sparked the basis for "Tenure."

Fundamentally, "Tenure" is a film about buried guilt and torturous responsibility. It is the story of a professor who, in a desperate single-minded drive to get one thing, namely tenure, he reaches into the darkness and gets exactly what he asks for. The hellish forces which Paul Rennick embraces as a last resort are the facilitators of long-deferred reckoning of his own creation.

Drawing on the themes of Franz Kafka's "The Trial," Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's "Faust," and Dante Alighieri's "Inferno" -- "Tenure" leans on its literary and legendary inspiration to tell a story of the transformation of devotion into desire, ambition into greed, and the depths a man will sink when he is denied what he wants most.