INFORMATION

Director: James Vaughan
Year: 2021
Duration: 82’
Language: VOSE | VOSC
Genre: Drama

SYNOPSIS

Friends and Strangers is a highly surreal comedy-drama that explores displacement, disconnection and boredom in contemporary Australia through the eyes of two upper-middle-class millennials. Boldly contextualized and with many registers, the film explores the lives of Alice and Ray, two homeless men in their late thirties who were respectively born into a privileged class, although they were never able to land a steady job or undertake a business project, because of their affective inestability. To abandon boredom, however, forces them to rethink their lives and give meaning to what they do and dream of making, although they know this authenticity won’t be found in a society built on lies.

DIRECTOR’S BIOGRAPHY

James Vaughan wrote and directed the short film You Like It, You Love It (2013), which screened at the Berlinale, the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival and the Melbourne International Film Festival, where he received the Swinburne Australian Filmmaker Award Emergent and the ATOM Award for the Best Experimental Film. In 2015 he received the Talent Escalator for Director’s Acclaim from Screen Australia. Vaughan was involved in the creation of the Australian Museum of Contemporary Art Contemporary Film Program in 2016, which brought together a number of critics, curators and professionals for a free weekly new film voices program. In 2018, he also founded Leitourgia Films.