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A woman in financial straits takes a job at a fly-by-night call centre where she finds that desperation alone won’t turn her into a successful salesperson.

Creative team

Writer/director/producer: Erica Genereux Smith

Filmmaker’s statement

Are You With Me? deals with themes of desperation and fraud. The film is based on one of my own experiences seeking employment as a young person.

I used the actual script from that call centre as well as my memories of the PT Barnum-like figure running the operation to develop this project.

About Erica Genereux Smith

Erica Genereux Smith is a filmmaker, writer and performer.

Her MFA thesis project in film production at York University was awarded a Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship and a SIM Digital in-kind grant, and featured Carolyn Taylor of CBC’s Canadian Screen Award nominated Baroness Von Sketch Show.

She previously studied at the Atlantic Theater Company in New York where she lived and worked for several years as a performer and theatre maker. Selected performance credits from this period include Jeremy Saulnier’s Blue Ruin, The Onion News Network and Pipeline Theater Company’s The Ash Girl. Her play Our Side of the Fence was produced at Dixon Place in New York as part of the OBIE award-winning Little Theatre series.

Her short film Night Life has screened at Anthology Film Archives, Brooklyn’s Northside Festival, the Canadian Film Festival, and on Kentucker Audley’s NoBudge, where it was awarded the Spirit of NoBudge 2014.

Her short film Are You With Me? screened at Videology in New York and was named one of the year’s best shorts by FilmPulse. Her most recent short, A Brief History of the Apocalypse, screened at the Vancouver International Film Festival and the Atlantic Film Festival.

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