I LIVE HERE NOW: Fantasia Festival Poster Now Available for Julie Pacino's Psychodrama

In the surreal landscape of I LIVE HERE NOW, struggling actress Rose (Lucy Fry) finds her life upended by unexpected news. She’s suddenly forced to confront a future she never thought possible, just as a major career opportunity with top agent Cindy Abrams (Cara Seymour) comes into view. Things spiral further when her casual boyfriend, Travis (Matt Rife) brings his overbearing mother (Sheryl Lee) into the fold, pushing Rose to the brink.

 

She flees to The Crown Inn, a crumbling motel at the edge of nowhere, where time fractures and reality bends. Haunted by sleep paralysis, splintered memories, and eerie motel dwellers, especially the enigmatic Lillian (Madeline Brewer), Rose begins to unravel.

 

To move forward, she must confront the buried truth of her past that her body has never forgotten.

 

Shot on vibrant 35mm with striking 16mm sequences, and directed by Julie Pacino in her feature debut, I LIVE HERE NOW is a haunting, dreamlike psychodrama about identity, trauma, and the fragile line between memory and madness.

Genre filmmaking has always inspired me because of the freedom it allows in exploring the irony and humor life presents, even in moments of horror. I LIVE HERE NOW extends that same freedom to the viewer to experience whatever range of emotions it elicits as they take away their own interpretation.

 

I LIVE HERE NOW opens with a painful fire burning deep inside of our lead character, Rose. Within these flames we see a flashback of the abuse Rose survived as a young girl. Rose has dealt with profound trauma in early childhood, and was conditioned to push it down. Colored and skewed by her fragmented memory of the incident, she created a story to protect herself from the truth. The film unfolds through a surrealist lens, weaving humor and horror into Rose’s reality as she attempts to unearth her deepest secret.

 

In I LIVE HERE NOW, I wanted to explore the stories we create around trauma to protect ourselves from this passively burning pain. A surprise pregnancy becomes a catalyst that forces Rose to finally explore other aspects of herself and her body which have been neglected since childhood.

 

I chose to shoot the film on celluloid—both 35mm and 16mm—because it better allowed me to capture Rose’s humanity. Film has imperfections, and I love that. The little scratches, the rough patches, the random magic that comes from an accidental light leak. It all compounds to create a final product that is both raw and beautiful.

 

I’m especially drawn to the way film handles highly saturated colors. Color plays a central symbolic role in this movie. As Rose re-connects with herself, her world becomes more vivid and striking. Rose is confronted by generational wounds, self-shame, and internalized misogyny, all represented by different colors and characters within the Inn.

 

I LIVE HERE NOW came from an intense time in my life when I was dealing with the resurfacing of painful emotions that I really wanted to run away from. We have to circle that pain many times before we can find a new path forward—to break patterns and rewire old emotional truths. I’ve found that the parts of ourselves we are most ashamed of are often our greatest sources of strength.