Film
Connected, by Luke Gilford, is a portrait of a woman grappling with aging, self-perception, and transformation in a technologically optimized world. Jackie, played by Pamela Anderson, is a burnt-out AuraCycle instructor in the midst of a midlife crisis. Guided by her effortless and nubile mentor, Luna (Dree Hemingway), Jackie will give up anything to feel “connected" -- to herself, to the future, and to a precarious sense of perfection.
Set in a stark, somewhat ominous near-future, Connected marks a major departure for the world’s most famous sex symbol: Pamela Anderson turns in a raw, brave performance as a beauty queen who’s aging under the harsh glow of her screens and feeds, drifting from her followers, friends, and family, and desperately seeking, yes, connection.
Anderson plays Jackie, an AuraCycle workout instructor who performs for an online audience and listens to self-help podcasts voiced by Jane Fonda, that promise eternal life in a fast-approaching new world. Jackie heads to a wellness retreat that is a bit cultish and creepy.
Directed by Luke Gilford, 29 an acclaimed fashion photographer, Connected packs an awful lot into his 10-minute short, which was produced by Cadence Films. Anderson is front and center throughout, often the only figure on screen, melancholy and cracking at the seams.
"In the new world you will be re-invented, your identity evaporated."
Gilford calls his short a “portrait of a woman grappling with aging, self-perception and transformation in a technologically optimized world.” Anderson said she was terrified to shoot. During a screening, Anderson said that above all, for her, the film was about creating empathy for women in Jackie’s situation.
Related articles
“Connected” is one of the most generic, but most loaded, buzzwords still in circulation, and for a reason. The notion that information technology is increasingly connecting our lives, for better and worse, is a rudiment of the web 1.0—and the term remains coded with both Utopian and dystopian tones. Like most good science fiction, the film uses the future as a mirror to refract the present: Today, given the never-ending cascade of new social media apps and the centrality of the old ones, connectedness is like an assumption everything else is built on. Which may be why we’re seeing a new wave of fictions that explore the future trajectories of this trend.
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