Writer, Reviewer & Film Journalist
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Director Interview: HI! YOU ARE CURRENTLY BEING RECORDED (2024)
Anna Maguire and Kyle Greenberg’s HI! YOU ARE CURRENTLY BEING RECORDED (2024) is The Truman Show meeting the world of security cameras and Amazon doorbells.
Anchored by Maguire’s performance as “Anna”, who is solo travelling through Los Angeles, the film teeters delightfully between fact and fiction. What begins as a laid-back visit to a new love-interest quickly dissolves into a glitchy, anxious spiral, as Anna becomes increasingly unsure if she’s being watched or followed through the Los Angeles sprawl.
HI! YOU ARE CURRENTLY BEING RECORDED is a lo-fi thriller that lands somewhere between paranoid drama and experimental city symphony. The short film embraces the grainy, digital imagery that echoes the very technologies it critiques in the film. Security camera footage, phone screens, and fractured audio feed into a kaleidoscope of paranoia that turn every day, urban settings into ominous places that feel loaded with threat.
As well as making a point about modern surveillance, Maguire and Greenberg also explore how perception (of the self, by others, and by all-seeing cameras) are shaping our identity and behaviours. It’s unnerving, unsettling, and strangely memorable.
Yet there’s another twist in the film’s release. Maguire and Greenberg are playing HI! on a continual loop on a dedicated website. The short is broadcast as a never-ending surveillance loop, playing over-and-over-again without interruption for 24-hrs. By releasing the film online as an endless loop, the filmmakers cleverly underline their themes—how do you escape being watched when the watching never stops?
HI! YOU ARE CURRENTLY BEING RECORDED is an off-beat, memorable dispatch from a digital age of distrust. Christina Brennan speaks to directors, Anna Maguire and Kyle Greenberg, about HI!, the festival circuit, and the film's online release.
You describe HI! YOU ARE CURRENTLY BEING RECORDED as a “stoner-surveillance-thriller”— can you unpack that genre and talk about its tone and structure?
These are all massive references, but we thought about classics like The Birds, The Conversation, The Truman Show and even 2001: A Space Odyssey when visualizing HI! YOU ARE CURRENTLY BEING RECORDED. We wanted to make the viewer feel as tense as Anna's character is, but also simultaneously question (and amplify) her paranoia as a result of being high. It's been interesting to see how many viewers have been able to connect with these feelings of paranoia while stoned, but for those who don't smoke, we wanted to ensure they could still relate to this feeling of 'being watched'. Utilizing multiple cameras was integral for us when structuring the beats in the film and building that anxious tone.
How do you think the experience of watching this film alone at home versus in a packed festival screening changes its emotional effect?
While many filmmakers can be very adamant that their film must be seen on a big screen, we're even more excited about the 'small screen' experience and how HI! will take on a new life as a never-ending loop at hiyouarecurrentlybeingrecorded.com. Viewing the film alone at-home or on-your-phone only builds on the isolation within the film, but whether on a big or small screen, we've found audiences are by-and-large disturbed and/or often uneasy!
You’ve played at festivals worldwide. Did any particular festival or environment shift the way you viewed the film afterwards?
While we've been fortunate to have HI! selected at some incredible festivals across the globe, we actually couldn't make it to any screenings of the film given work/life/etc, until this month in Los Angeles (where the film screened as part of our Cannes Dogs roaming film series paired with Ben Petrie's feature debut, The Heirloom). It was really incredible to finally see HI! with a crowd and experience the audience tense up in real life.
You’ve recently launched STUPID CO and are creating your own corner of the film world. What’s been the most rewarding (or ridiculous!) part so far?
Building STUPID has been a really fulfilling, organic process stemming out of our own creative endeavors. HI! really kickstarted a whole pipeline of projects for us from a new short film called FRENCH LESSONS (now on the fest circuit) to Anna's debut feature EXTERNAL NEIGHBOURS (shooting end of year), a one-day October festival called OFF-VIFF, our zine and roaming dog-friendly screening series CANNES DOGS and more we haven't even announced yet. A few years ago, we never would have imagined we'd be creating an ENDLESS LOOP to release a film or have thrown dog-friendly film screenings across the globe. Ultimately we just want to keep having fun, supporting our friends and encouraging people to make their own art!