In the bar we are friends and I am telling you about my day (2025) Effie Cherif

“Time flew while you worked furiously without knowing it: you lived in a compatible world of pictures that passed through your mind like a magic-lantern, often in vivid and glorious loonycolour, a world where memory and imagination ran free and did acrobatic tricks with your past and with what might be your future…” from Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, by Alan Silitoe (1928 - 2010)

When you pour enough pints that your hands move by themselves and your head is polished into a blank slate - that’s when you can really get to thinkin’. This is a film for everyone who wished that they could press a button at the end of their shift to print a receipt of their last 7 hours of witty internal monologue. In the bar we are friends and I am telling you about my day (2025) preserves a conversational flight of fancy from the artiste/worker, caught behind the bar like a stock-image butterfly in the amber of an ale.

In a frictionless whiteboard space that recalls the early YouTube Genre of "draw my life" videos and the Brit-optimism of the early vloggers; shiny personal icons and air-tight delineations of preference are the internal protection against the dirtiness of the pub. Cherif presents "The Pub" as the flagship for a decline in British life.

Cherif has a knack for creating joy on her terms. Her narrative takes detours but never wanders- which is more than you can say about the glut of most first-person-narrator experimental films. Epic needle-drops of indie hits, royalty free muzak and throwback tiktok songs diffuse the irritating omniscience that can come with the experimental voice-over style. Whilst the familiar tactility of the pinch and zoom editing style, give a sense of how she works on the ipad screen, there is no irritating meta-play of the try-hard desktop cinema - a fake genre for uncreative literal-brained graduates of Artist Moving Image MA programs. The only good examples to this day remain the 2014 horror Unfriended or Josiane Pozi's video work Omegle (2021) . Effie’s positioning of the spectator as a friend is refreshing when so many experimental films feel like they were made to tick quotas for festival judges.

This video was first shown at (Hollywood Superstar favourite) Gnossienne gallery, but this particular critic thinks that the LED screen of a laptop is the most appropriate way to watch this film. Watch it now ^

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Allie Anime ASMR Documentary (10 HOURS), (2020)
Youtube Video dir. Video Expert (Neal Wynne and Sabrina Greco), uploaded July 26th 2020.

From Neal Wynne,

"Video Expert is the name of an Instagram account run by Sabrina [Greco] and me that at one point also represented an official LLC, though I need to check its legal status... It started as a joke name for a production company among my friends and me at Boston University. Some important Video Experts include Patrick Reid, Jake Squire, Carlos Garcia, Patrick Migliore, Skylar Davis, Charlie Turner, and Sarah Rouhani. While there, we made a number of short films and sketches together.

One of these sketches was Allie ASMR. This sketch was about our friend Allie Miller, who started drawing anime girls in college and continued while she was living in Philly during Covid. I believe we shot the interview in Yorba Linda, CA, and then our friend Taylor Gonzales shot the footage in Philly and sent it to us to edit. After making a few of these sketches, we decided it would be a good format for a feature film that was a shorts/sketches compilation. That ultimately became Video Expert1

Lately, I’ve been loving the idea of OG High Definition. There’s something so satisfying about it. It’s basically the minimum resolution needed to make an image look as detailed as real life on most screen sizes, including movie theaters (lots of theaters still project at 2K). 1080p files—especially ProRes—are easy to work with, run great on most computers, and aren’t too large. I believe Allie ASMR was shot at 1080p...

"Post-liminal" refers to the fact that there’s now no shortage of filmmakers addressing these liminal vibes. I’d also argue that the main character of The Trick, Steve, knows what "liminal" is. So when the characters in a movie are aware of the movie’s theme, you get to hit it with “post.”"