By Michele Diomà

It was the spring of 2022 when I received a short movie that intrigued me from the moment I saw the movie poster. It was titled “The Fool.” I hadn’t even finished watching it before deciding that I would ask the two young filmmakers behind it, Darius J. Rubin and Yoshima Yamamoto, to collaborate on my next film to be shot in New York. When you come across hundreds of projects each week, as I do, you quickly learn to recognize the artists who shine with a unique light. I am very happy today to say that the film we worked on together between Manhattan and Brooklyn, O – the fiRSt mOvie by aN alien, is now in post-production. I am equally excited to present to the Wild Filmmaker Community the new project directed by Darius, with cinematography by Yoshima: “In Service”.

Here is an exclusive interview with Darius J. Rubin:

-When did you first fall in love with Cinema?

Ever since I was a kid, I always loved movies. I think when I really fell in love with it was high school, as I was getting older and my eyes started opening to the magnitude of life that I hadn’t been aware of before. This coming-of-age experience was paralleled by a new experience of movies, as a form of rebellion against the stiffness of the authorities in my life at the time, like school and parents. Movies from that time include Pulp Fiction, Dazed-and-confused, Searching for Sugarman, Big Lebowski, La Haine, Boogie Nights, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. These movies aren’t necessarily my all time favorites, they’re all great, but they were the types of movies I was watching at the time that Cinema started playing a very big part of my life. 

-Tell us about your last short “In Service.”

It’s set at a funeral, and revolves around a group of young people who have lost a close friend to Suicide. The film explores the cacophony of sounds and voices that populate the space, as people use the experience of grief as an opportunity to bring the conversation back to themselves. This competition for social clout (a very 21st century phenomenon), actively prevents people from expressing the necessary vulnerability to process their grief. We try to explore this by poking fun at the asinine ways we all behave these days in pursuit of social validation. 

–When did you realize that this story had to be made into a film?

I’m not sure if there was a specific point that I realized it absolutely had to be a film, but the idea for the story came to me from personal experience, one that stuck with me and shaped who I am, so I thought that, after completing my first film (the Fool), “In Service” had to be the next step. It represented my opinion on society at the time, which I would like to say has grown since, where I was very frustrated with the competition I saw between people on social media, the dopamine roundabout of happiness and despair that constitutes our daily lives, when so much of it is lived online. The experience of the funeral, where I witnessed such a sacred and deeply human event be dominated by this dopamine-grabbing crusade for social-relevance, was, I thought, a perfect example of how we are all missing the trick about what’s really important. And what’s that? The understanding that we are all in this together, none of us have all the answers, so let’s just be honest about that and have a better time. When we are all competing, something like that becomes impossible.

–Is there a person you would like to thank for helping you bring your project to life?

There are lots and lots of people to thank but I would like to point out two people specifically. Adrienne Weiss runs a program called Directing Actors. I did this for two weeks in the lead-up to shooting, and it revolutionized the way I understood working with actors, the backstory of characters, connecting to the specificity of what motivates a character to act in a certain way. Secondly, I would thank Dina Amer for encouraging to me connect with myself and my voice, and for always pushing me to go deeper into the motivations for each character and each scene.  

Do you think the Wild Filmmaker Community is helping to turn your dream into a reality?

How could I do it without you Michele!