A young man opens his heart to a beautiful woman via an old-fashioned letter in the post in this clip from Terence Nance’s first full-length feature, An Oversimplification of Her Beauty, an Official Selection at Sundance 2012. Raised in Dallas, Texas, Brooklyn-based Nance wrote, directed, edited and played the male lead in the film alongside his real-life object of desire, Namik Minter, taking a magnifying glass to the miscommunications and anxieties of relationships through envelope-pushing cinematography interspersed with quirky animation. The result is a swirl of romance and neurosis worthy of Woody Allen. The film grew out of How Would You Feel?, a short made while Nance was still a student at NYU in 2010, and was initially funded by Kickstarter before Jay-Z, Dream Hampton and Wyatt Cenac stepped in as executive producers. “Love comes from physiological reactions that are not necessarily explainable,” says Nance, whose dreamlike visual effects are so visceral that friends who have seen the film project their own stories on to his. “My response is always, ‘Are you me or are you her?’ and I’m always surprised at which the person is. Sometimes, it’s both.”

An Oversimplification of Her Beauty opens in New York on April 26, and goes nationwide in the US on May 17, 2013.