British filmmaker Fyzal Boulifa’s award-winning short Rate Me tells the story of a teen escort through twelve online user reviews. The film won the Illy award at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for the Short Film Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Here, the filmmaker talks about the ideas behind the film:

“Technophobia in the cinema is often super serious: sombre sci-fi cityscapes and clean-edged, hyper-rational futures. Often I don’t relate. The idea that order and over-sophistication will be our undoing seems optimistic, an over-estimation of our natures even. 

“We want Rate Me to playfully evoke the internet as the giant, swirling trash can it feels more like to me; technological singularity not as hyper-intelligence but as hyper-stupidity. In ‘post-truth’ 2016 perhaps this alternative reality feels closer. 

“My films until now have all in some way been about the violence of being seen. Rate Me takes that as far as possible—the film conceived as a kind of portrait with no interior—to the point where there is, in fact, nothing but to be seen.”