“We live a lot of our lives in this space that’s both personal and very public,” explains director Peter Vack, who explores social media truisms in his short film, Send. “And we augment our personalities, sometimes very drastically, and sometimes subtly to fit that stage.” 

The project was inspired partly by the first instance of a dissemination of a private video that Vack encountered in the pre-Facebook era, and partly by a friend of his who had a similar experience years later when sexting became commonplace. “I was interested in how to visually take on social media and how to represent in film the way we communicate, which is pretty abstract.” 

Fortunately for Vack, who is the son of a filmmaker and has been acting since he was a child – recently featuring in Amazon’s 2014 series Mozart in the Jungle – he was able to turn to his peers, casting fellow New Yorker Jake Cannavale (Nurse Jackie), and his friend Julia Garner, to portray the raw emotions that come up when reconciling an intimate encounter with a public persona. “Julia exists on a plane where she’s not even acting,” says Vack of Garner, who appeared in Martha Marcy May Marlene. “She’s almost like a spirit medium for something ancient – and that can’t be taught.”

Vack has a feature-length project in the works with Garner attached, www.Rachelormont.com, which is conceptually similar to Send. “I try to look at the real, heightened and potentially tragic emotions behind these new web dilemmas,” he says. “We can think that it’s all very silly, but we have had the same problems since the days of Greek amphitheatres – even if they have been put through the weird meat grinder of the internet.”