My first feature as writer-director premieres June 29th at the Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, CA as part of Dances With Films’ 29th edition.

What’s it about? Well it’s safe to say it really has absolutely nothing to do with Jesus.

Book here! The special presale price ends June 19th 2024.

The logline: Seventeen-year-old Mati Flores stares down a rabbit hole of sex, drugs, and self-delusion in an LA trap-house full of people who show her what she could become.

While not a “true story”, it’s deeply rooted in my personal experiences.

I moved out of my parents and in with a boyfriend in South Africa at 17 and at 18, survived a year without a work permit in London, living in a heroin squat. A kindly addict advised me to “wait and watch a couple of weeks” before trying any drugs, particularly if they were “free”. During those weeks, two housemates overdosed. One died.

Everyone else kept shooting up to Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on repeat.

As a young journalist back home in South Africa, dating first a tortured comedian, then a former lead singer of a nearly-great band, I lost close friends to drug overdoses or suicide. It’s hard to say which.  

Years later, my LA downstairs neighbor – a rock drummer and addict – welcomed me to my roach-infested first LA apartment by trying to kick down my door for “walking on his ceiling”. So I wrote this film, imagined off my adventures, in the even-worse building opposite me. Did that 3AM gunshot come from behind its trash-bag-curtain windows? Why won’t 911 come?

“Anything could be happening there”, I thought…