IFR Tribeca BALTHAZAR video

Описание: 37 minute Interview with Nate DeYoung & Erin DeWitt -- editors of
OUR HERO BALTHAZAR which premiered at this year's TRIBECA FEST
Interviewer - Scott Bayer, Indie Film Reporter - Background on Film below.
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
In the attention economy, all of life is a performance. Identity, ideology, tragedy. But how can we authentically process anything if it’s all a performance? And if it’s all a performance, how do we know what to take seriously?
With this film, my hope is to explore these questions through two lost American boys struggling to see the world and see each other, and in doing so to capture just how tragic and hilarious it is to be a young man in this decaying empire
LOGLINE: Ultra-wealthy NYC teenager Balthy makes dramatic gun control videos to impress his activist crush. When an online troll targets his content, Balthy becomes convinced he's communicating with a potential school shooter and embarks on an ill-advised journey to Texas to confront him.
SYNOPSIS: From first-time feature filmmaker Oscar Boyson comes an audacious coming-of-age story that fearlessly explores the impact of social media and American gun culture on modern adolescence through an incisive yet blackly comic lens.
Hoping to impress an activist classmate, wealthy New York City teenager Balthazar “Balthy” Malone (Jaeden Martell, It, Knives Out) begins posting emotional videos on social media, pleading for stricter gun laws. But his tearful clips soon attract the attention of an online troll who claims he is planning a school shooting. Acting on impulse, Balthy heads to Texas to try to prevent the tragedy by befriending the potential shooter “IRL”—a term his crush used and Balthy misunderstood.
But the misguided teen’s journey to the south takes a turn for the surreal once he meets fellow lost soul Solomon (Asa Butterfield, Sex Education, Hugo) IRL. Together, the two boys from vastly different worlds must navigate a confusing and combustible set of misunderstandings, both absurd and terrifying. Even though they find genuine moments of connection, their path nevertheless moves them ever closer toward an all-too-preventable fate.
A marriage of dark comedy and bracing, nuanced character drama, Our Hero, Balthazar stars Jaeden Martell, Asa Butterfield, Chris Bauer, Jennifer Ehle, Anna Baryshnikov, Noah Centineo, Becky Ann Baker, Avan Jogia and Pippa Knowles. Co-written by Boyson and Ricky Camilleri, the film is also produced by Boyson and Camilleri, as well as Jon Wroblewski, David Duque-Estrada, Miles Skinner, Alex Hughes and Jaeden Martell.
The Film is a darkly comedic and provocative thriller set at the volatile intersection of wealth, performance, trauma, and the social media age. When a privileged, emotionally stunted teenage boy from Manhattan inserts himself into the tragedy of a potential school shooting in Texas, what begins as a misguided attempt at online heroism spirals into something far more dangerous—and deeply revealing.
Balthazar is a teenage boy lost in the curated artifice of digital life. Desperate to be seen and to feel something real, he seizes on a disturbing DM exchange with a potential mass shooter as his chance to make a difference—or at least make an impact. He travels to Texas, convinced that he alone can prevent a tragedy, only to find himself entangled with Solomon, a volatile and enigmatic young man whose online persona may not match his reality.
Co-written and directed by Oscar Boyson (Uncut Gems, Good Time) i, alongside co-writer Ricky Camilleri, the film blends unsettling tension with absurdist humor. Boyson and Camilleri explore the irony of a culture that celebrates personal tragedy as currency and treats empathy as performative spectacle.
While the first act seduces with sharp satire of elite urban aloofness, the narrative abruptly shifts—mirroring the disorienting way news cycles fracture reality—to the perspective of Solomon, a young man shaped by an America in which violence and alienation are ambient. The film refuses easy answers or moralizing. Instead, it interrogates what it means to be authentic in a world where every gesture might be a performance, and where tragedy has become not just a news item but a means of branding.