Director’s Statment

I’m best known for my award-winning short film Timmy and the Dreamkillers, which won First Prize for Short Animation at the Academy Award Qualifying Rhode Island International Film Festival in 2019.

Sydney is my first feature film. It began as a concept for a scripted podcast in the summer of 2022 but was quickly transformed into a feature film about a podcast recording.

Comedy was subverted into madness, and it wasn’t long before a surreal nature inspired by filmmakers like David Lynch crept in.

The film has been called — unclassifiable — so, I created a new genre for it called AUTOMETAPUNK.

This means — “a self referential artistic work created by alternative means, dealing with the creator’s own life.”

Sydney is intense, unsettling, sometimes comedic, and always building to it’s explosive reveal at the end.

Each character is taking on multiple personas, whether they know it or not.

Through my studies of screenwriting and filmmaking at the University of Michigan and New York University, I strive to reinvent structure and form any way I can.

This is how Sydney found her unbeaten path, blending fiction and reality.

-Jeremy Berkowitz