The Code

This special screening of THE CODE will be followed by a post-film in-person discussion with director Eugene Kotlyarenko!

THE FILM

When Celine begins filming a documentary about her failing relationship, her boyfriend, Jay, becomes suspicious that she may have an ulterior motive: to cancel him. In a paranoid attempt to seize authorship over the film, Jay sets up hidden cameras and tries to entrap Celine into problematic behavior he can record as insurance. As their secret surveillance escalates, they find themselves creating a movie full of absurd, erotic and highly performative scenes, with a wild cast of characters. But when another couple’s whirlwind marriage puts Jay and Celine’s dysfunctional dynamic into perspective, the two of them must use all the cinematic moments they've shared to try and save their love, in this high-concept relationship comedy that asks, “Who’s in control of the narrative?”

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SPECIAL GUESTS

Eugene Kotlyarenko was born in 1986 in Odessa, Ukraine. Based in LA, he has made 6 feature films exploring love, identity and cultural madness in the age of social media. His debut features, 0S & 1s, and SKYDIVER, both released in 2010, were amongst the first to utilize the visual language of a computer screen to tell a cinematic story. His autofiction romantic comedies A WONDERFUL CLOUD starring Katelyn Sheil and WOBBLE PALACE starring Dasha Nekrasova premiered at SXSW (2015 and 2018 respectively), and were favorably compared to the films of Woody Allen and Albert Brooks. In 2020, he premiered SPREE at the Sundance film festival. A movie presented as a live-stream, following a rideshare driver looking to go viral via mass murder, it was a cult sensation with teenage audiences around the world. Later that year, he self-released WE ARE, a surreal indictment of the tech world. After retrospectives in NY, London, Toronto and Sydney, arthouse streamer MUBI programmed a series of Eugene's work
called "Love Me, Click Me!" in 2023.

DIRECTOR STATEMENT

THE CODE is an attempt to revitalize the language of cinema for a new era of spectatorship. By using modes of surveillance, social media, documentary, pornography, reality tv and more, I've tried to comedically explore a crucial contemporary question: who is in control of a narrative? A cultural narrative; a relationship narrative; a news narrative. By making the act of editing a central plot point, I hope the film will confront the audience with the idea of destabilized authorship, in exciting and relevant ways. I also aim to recalibrate cinematic voyeurism, as it applies to our fetishization of “Other People’s Phones.” The biggest inspiration for the film is the writer Junichiro Tanizaki, who often dealt with lust, unreliable perspectives and scheming lovers. Besides Tanizaki, my film language draws from the giants of sex comedy: Almodovar, Rohmer, Allen, Wertmuller, Brass, etc. This is my 7th feature film and I believe it is a strong summation of my formal and thematic preoccupations up until this point. It was made with a smaller team than my previous feature, Spree, and has a much more intimate feel to it, which I hope comes across to the viewer-voyeur.

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