Clap:
Debut, or, objects of the field of debris as currently catalogued

A young filmmaker named Julian stumbles on a hidden book tied to a vanished art forger and the perfect mystery for his next film pitch. But as coincidences mount and paranoia sets in, he begins to question what’s real, who’s watching him, and whether he’s directing the story or being directed by it.

“There’s all this talk these days about the notion of “autofiction” for young American writers. To me, I saw this film as an “inverse autofiction,” and by “inverse” I mean rather than taking my life and distilling it down to a fiction by the process of changing little things, I could invent a fiction that would require reality to form around it… Because the fiction demanded it, now there’s this real evidence.”

Juliana Castronovo’s film is obsessed with forgery, masks, and a fake-it-till-you-make-it mentality across disciplines. There is something indescribably seductive about working with forgeries—an absurd program that is, at the same time, a form of commitment in its own right. The viewer is exposed to the narrator’s obsession with compiling endless lists of small objects from which a detective story is assembled—or perhaps nothing at all. We find a key to a map, only to reveal a larger constellation of unsolvable maps, an excess of meanings. Philosopher Miroslav Petříček speaks of the affinity between detective fiction and philosophical inquiry: the key is not only to discover what happened, but also how it is possible that it makes sense at all.

Debut is interwoven with the techniques of modern writers—Pynchon, Sebald, Ballard. Like the protagonist, we are urged to search for signal in the noise. We allow ourselves to present the first piece of evidence in the form of a yet-unrevealed prelude film.