Tune into the latest chapter of New American Voices this week with a surreal transmission from an up-and-coming experimental filmmaker.

Set in a nightmarish sitcom universe, Philip Thompson’s Living Reality uses popular television tropes to comment on the pointed loneliness of city life. Mixing vérité footage of Thompson’s friends with elaborate scripted scenes that recall shows like Friends and How I Met Your Mother, Thompson’s short offers a fresh vision of what American experimental film looks like.

Theo (Thompson, in the lead role) is part of a cheery group of friends whose antics are often accompanied with a laugh-track. Except, he is unhappy. A clear outlier among his friends, he often retreats to his apartment to watch scenes of everyday life unfold on his massive CRT TV. As Thompson cuts between Theo’s sad lived-experience on a sitcom set and visions of twentysomething idledom taken from his real life, he produces a wonderful puzzle of a film that shows that life — scripted or not — is full of panged emotion.

“I made this film with my friends a few years after finishing undergrad, where I was living in New York, and beginning to confront the gap between the sitcom life I imagined for myself, and the more banal reality I ended up experiencing. We shot the scripted portions in a church in Boston with miniDV cameras, and the unscripted portions in New York in the summer of 2023 with flip video cameras.” PHILIP THOMPSON

Thompson’s friends and collaborators were crucial to the making of Living Reality, especially producers Aidan Cronin and Desirée Tolchin, with whom he co-founded the Ithaca Experimental Film Festival in 2023. Not only is Thompson committed to creating films that push against the norms of conventional filmmaking, but he and his peers have also made it their mission to champion such experiments as producers and programmers too.

Brooklyn-based filmmaker Philip Thompson explores popular media’s influence on culture in his work. His films Living Reality and I’m At Home rework series he watched growing up — Friends and Blue’s Clues, respectively — into chilling examinations of burnout and aimlessness. In 2023, he was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film. More recently, he was a fellow of Sundance Ignite, NYFF Artists Academy, and Film Independent Amplifier programs. His debut feature, Dance Monkey Dance, was also selected for the Sundance Screenwriters Lab.

Text written by Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer. Special thanks to Inney Prakash, Jinho Myung, and Philip Thompson.