Brooklyn Film Festival 2019 winner and Sydney Underground Film Festival 2019 winning film USE ME, released on Apple TV, Google, Google Play, Sky Box Office, and YouTube on Thursday 11 March, 2020.
USE ME is a doco-style thriller written, directed and starring Australian award-winning documentary filmmaker Julian Shaw (Darling! The Pieter-Dirk Uys Story). Julian (as himself) travels to the United States to direct a documentary focusing on ‘mental humiliatrix’ Ceara Lynch (as herself). She dominates a new niche of online sex work and has made a fortune by humiliating men over the Internet without ever exposing her naked body or meeting them in person.
Julian films everything he witnesses to the point of obsession. He films her alone and with others. He films her while she teases and abuses men through her webcam. He sees the power she wields in her profession and is enthralled.
Ceara ensnares Julian in her illusory world and he quickly develops misplaced feelings for her. His newfound proximity reveals that, in her work, the line between fantasy and reality isn’t as clear as she has led him to believe. Could it be that Ceara is blackmailing clients who trusted her with personal, deeply embarrassing material?
An initially tantalising documentary project turns into a private investigation as the jilted Julian digs deeper into his subject’s morally questionable professional life. When he engineers a real-world encounter between Ceara and one of her suspected marks, what was meant to be entertainment becomes a matter of life and death.
Julian Shaw comments;
“Inspired by the reality I witnessed; I shaped the film around a fictional through-line which allowed me to explore characters (including my own) with greater emotional complexity.
It’s a visceral, suspenseful, sexually charged thriller set in the intersection between reality and fiction, a cinematic crevice that is just right for the times we live in: the post-truth era.”
USE ME is produced by Jonathon Green at Green Light Production Pty Ltd, Co-Produced/UPM by AJ Gordan and Distributed by Filmink Presents.
Marguerite Barbara PR 