WRITER/DIRECTOR: Jessi Gaston
PRODUCERS: Harley Foos, Quinn Nicholson
EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS: Eugene Sun Park, Erica Duffy
DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: Jason Chiu
GENRE: Horror/Sci-Fi
FORMAT: Short Film
STATUS: Distribution

LOGLINE: 
In a near-future techno-dystopia, a trans-masc shut in named Ven orders a box of pills off a shady website that promise to make their aberrant and strange fantasies a reality.

SYNOPSIS:
Ven is a shut-in with no prospects and no interest in gaining any. In their cluttered and dark room, they sit and do nothing but stare at their computer screen all day. They have been fixated on their own lack for so long, their memory of any other way of life is gone and their mind, left in the dark, has been consumed by self-destructive desires. Black Pill offers no answers as to how a person might wind up like this, but Ven’s life bears obvious similarities to a certain subculture of angry and excluded young men whose feelings of inadequacy have turned to depressive and anti-social rage and aberrancy on the Internet. That Ven is possibly a kind of incel is, however, troubled by the fact that they are trans, that their struggles are quite possibly rooted in the extreme feelings of alienation and failure that so often go hand-in-hand with a trans identity.

There is, however, a crucial difference between Ven and the people of whom they’re reminiscent; they live in a world that’s crept a little further into the dark than ours, where even the desire for inhumanity and self-annihilation has been commodified. A shadowy company operating in the seedier corners of the Internet, with untold reach and resources, sells a handful of pills that, rather than kill a person, transforms them into something perpendicular to life and death. They sell, in other words, a way to obliterate everything human in a person. Around this product, they’ve also built an efficient marketing strategy. Every customer’s “transformation” is filmed and spliced together with footage of the moment they took their plunge. The resulting videos populate websites where nascent annihilation-seekers watch them for hours and hours, a kind of pornography for a new and devastating sexual fetish.

Black Pill gives audiences a glimpse into the entirety of this business model, where, at every level, there are only people who exist uncomfortably between victimhood and culpability. It asks if personal agency can factor in at all in such cold and impersonal circumstances, but it leaves any conclusions up to you. As Bryan Christopher noted in Rue Morgue, “[Black Pill] doesn’t seem to offer clear answers as to how we’re supposed to feel about the situation. But that’s kind of the point as these topics don’t lend themselves to simple answers.” Starring Avery Graham-Howard and Madeline Bernhard, Black Pill is the first film Jesi wrote and directed, and the first film produced by Harley Foos (Newcity’s Film 50 of 2020).

JESSI GASTON is a writer, director, poet & editor who resides in Chicago, Il. They are one of three creators of an ongoing episodic project called Tha Park, a Pop Magic Production, which was the recipient of a $10,000 grant from The Film Fund and a finalist for the Sundance Maker’s lab. It’s first iteration exists on the Internet, and its second iteration is currently in post-production. Their first feature screenplay, GOOMAH, was published through the small press Gauss-PDF in 2018. Straight Harley/Gay Harley, a short docu-comedy they wrote with Harley Foos, was selected as one of only a handful of finalists for “Pitch, Please,” Inside Out Film Festival’s pitch competition. In their other life as a person of letters, they have work in a variety of places, among them X-R-A-Y and Queen Mobs’ Teahouse. Three of their poems are forthcoming in We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, which will be published by Nightboat books. They are also the poetry & prose editor for Homintern, a queer, left-wing publication through which they have published works from four continents, and The Sick Muse, a Chicago-focused alternative quarterly with a readership in the thousands.

Black Pill is Jessi’s first film as a director and writer. An emotionally complicated work of speculative fiction and horror on the intersections of modern alienation, capitalism, and gender, it was produced by Full Spectrum. The film continues to make waves in the festival world, where it is already an Official Selection at Inside Out in Canada, Cinefantasy in Brazil, and Scumdance, Cinema Soup, & Indie Memphis in the United States, as well as being a finalist for Boobs & Blood.

More at https://jesssi.net/ and @jejesjesijessi on Twitter.