About The Project

The Logline (WHAT?)

ROAM_ANTICS_ is a cinematic interrogation of Western amnesia, performative masculinity, and the sheer, absurd delusion of seeking love within the machinery of your own erasure; or simply, "why I decided to waste $20,000 hoping for my first third date."

The Director's Statement (WHY?)

We are culturally conditioned to expect documentaries about minorities to function as pleading monologues disguised as a “dialogue”. The marginalized artist is supposed to bleed on screen, subject to the editorial control of a “balanced” gaze. Packaging their pain into a digestible linear narrative. CAUSE and EFFECT. All is fair in love and war for the viewer's catharsis.

ROAM_ANTICS_ firmly rejects this transaction.

Trauma and Storytelling

Society loves traumatized artists; some may say an artist must suffer. Plato insisted that storytelling must prioritize Moral Purpose over Artistic Freedom. Well, shit bitch, he also wasted 50 years on mental gymnastics only to justify his lust for pubescent twinks.

The straight agenda (pun intended) of compartmentalizing the human experience goes against any recent clinical understanding of our brains. Pushing mass information into bite-sized, accessible social structures are only to please the most simplistic and primitive part of our brain. Recent studies agree that the human brain is a mosaic structure, randomized lottery of activity centers. In our true form, we are anything but linear thinkers. So why popular storytelling haven’t changed for over 2,000 years?

The nature of trauma is anything but linear.

Jesusette

My body. A Levantine face that carries the effects of displacement. Frizzy curly hair; bold Jewish nose; dark hazel eyes; Kylie 808 Lipliner; M.A.C. Velvet Teddy; Maybelline eyeliner; fully bare under an Ottoman kaftan. Through my art and my life, I have come to understand how this specific body functions as a sacrifice. I have unwillingly offered myself up to crucifixion. Jerusalem’s steep and suffocating alleys were the altar. Hasidic husbands, Israeli soldiers, Israeli Arabs, Palestinians, settlers, Western tourists - all itching to unload. A drunk American man, a mumble of dissatisfaction, a gun. They take what they want, get back to their own, and leave me to rot on a mattress damp with their sweat stains.

"De Ranas" (2025, Saar Sition)

The Treatment (HOW?)

Via Dolorosa

After a decade of trauma - whether by the grunts and whims of diseased men, or by the abuse of micro-banged victims of daddy’s Amex - my systems are completely fucked. So I did the most rational thing possible: I decided to try it all over again, IN EUROPE. The chemically-induced homos promised me a haven of queer sex. But once again, men’s liberation depends on other’s sorrow. It’s quite tragic, a hysterical delusion. Seeking love and protection in an industrial rave that dances upon the unidentifiable bodies of your own people.

The Journey’s Conditions

Operating under a set of self-imposed scopes, ROAM_ANTICS_ turns a desperate search for romance into a gamified anthropological research.

"De Ranas" (2025, Saar Sition)

SECTION 1: “All the world's a stage, and all men are merely performative”

Someone once told me: “A barking dog doesn't bite, but trying to pet a fragile one will guarantee you a trip to the ER”. Male predation is not a niche product, but a global enterprise offering market-specific solutions. From the pseudoscientific alpha-bull looksmaxxer; to the queer-adjacent baiter, who appropriates radical queer language to groom and suffocate less vigilant prey. Both sides of that shit log are blind to the cognitive dissonance of demanding to be an apex predator while perpetually playing the victim’s victim. Hijacking cultures and communities to absolve themselves from their dad’s pending approval.

SECTION 2: The Irony

What’s a tragedy without irony? The film draws a direct dialectic between interpersonal abuse and the geopolitical hypocrisy of European agency. Europe has traded its historical guilt for a self-righteous savior complex, appropriating anti-fascist and anti-colonial struggles. I find myself, a queer Mizrahi Jew, standing on the very soil that once served as a mass graveyard for my people, only to be branded a "colonialist" by the descendants of the actual perpetrators. One of the forgotten traditions of 19th-century Europe was the use of cemeteries as communal venues for picnics, promenading, and celebrations. This social behavior died down (pun intended) with the beginning of the 20th century. You know who else died in the 20th century? And what are those golden plates with family names and dates, molded into pavements, casually stepped on by the patrons of overpriced collective galerias outside the Mitte? Gaslighting in plain sight: a way for antisemites to launder their own blood-stained map, using my identity as the soap. If I’ll forever be tagged as a leftist traitor in my homeland, why the fuck am I a bloodthirsty Zionist outside its borders? Who paid with their extinction for the establishment of the EU’s oriental lust for refugees?

SECTION 3: Affirmative Counter-Action

If I am to subject myself to virtual mind games, disguised as humanitarian polemics, I take the artistic liberty to design the avatars. I only initiate contact with men who are 1.95m or over (“6’5", blue eyes”). You want to use me in the sheets while screaming “Biology!” in the streets? No worries, it’s just Intersexual Selection. Look it up.

SECTION 4: The Invisible Wheelchair

The film captures the humiliating gap between the fearless provocateur I aspire to perform, and the paralyzed paranoid I truly am. There’s a difference between performing an imaginary lap dance in your living room, and actually riding it like a pro in front of a crowd. An endless war between the lust for jaw-dropping sexual liberation, and the paralyzing, OCD-induced physical anxiety that makes actual intimacy practically impossible. So if I were to pull out my Disability Card to skip the 4-hour line to the dark room, who’s gonna check me? I sure hope not the German selector at the door.

IF YOU READ THUS FAR

This film is 100% independent. At the time of this draft, there is no institutional funding.

Years of free labor and over $20,000 invested into this work out of my own pocket. This campaign exists to protect the project from immediate closure and allow the continuation of its development.