Writer / Director: James Kaelan
Producer: Blessing Yen

In Pre-Production

Play seeks to explore the nature and mores, both base and noble, of social revolution. Beneath the surface of the film is the theatre piece, You Must’ve Heard Something, by novelist and playwright James Kaelan. This work, first staged off Broadway in New York in 2008 and then adapted into a novella as part of Kaelan’s fiction collection We’re Getting On (Flatmancrooked, 2010), attempts to recontextualize the Rwandan genocide in a Western context.

The two characters in the play, Charles and Jane, have been trapped for a week in a city besieged by murderers—akin to the Hutu madmen who wandered the streets of Kigali in 1994. Our protagonists live in different buildings, divided by a narrow alley, seven floors above the street.

Though they can see into one another’s rooms, and though they can communicate, they can’t ever share the same physical space; even the brief journey from one building to the other is unthinkably dangerous. Play, though, does not attempt to recreate a Rwanda in the west. Instead, the film follows four people—a writer, a director, and two actors—as they attempt to stage You Must’ve Heard Something.

To ensure the project’s emotional and physical authenticity, the actors must recreate in their real lives the physical restrictions suffered by the characters they’re portraying. The resulting story is a sort of Black Swan meets Hotel Rwanda narrative, a film about the process of creating art that, as reality and sanity devolve, transmogrifies slowly into the genocidal play being staged.