Left Unsaid: film series explores the blurred reality between our online and offline selves

With everyone being so engaged in social media these days, it’s often hard to separate the online persona from the offline human. There is a line that is blurred – sometimes intentionally, sometimes not – when we start posting snippets of our personal lives all over the interwebs for the whole world to see. Through 140-character brain farts, status updates, microblogs, and snapshot images we develop composite pictures that may or may not reflect the totality of the individuals who publish them. Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and other social media applications have allowed us to expose more of ourselves to each other, but the core of who we are – what moves us, makes us happy, angry, sad, likeable or detestable – can still only be truly grasped by direct interaction. For this very reason, some people have chosen to opt out of the online world altogether, refusing to allow the line to be blurred because they realize that it’s important to maintain the humanness of connections.

Filmmaker Nelson George (who also produced Chris Rock’s ‘Good Hair’) has created a collection of very brief video vignettes that explores many of the social concerns of merging online conversations with offline reality. George’s series, Left Unsaid, chronicles several intimate interactions among a group of eclectic female creatives who’ve been invited to a meet-and-greet in a Brooklyn brownstone one sunny Sunday afternoon.  

The series is divided into 19 chapters, each of which focuses on one or more pseudo-fictional characters. I call them pseudo-fictional because it seems as if the characters themselves have been modeled after the women who are playing them. One particularly poignant interaction occurs between Belinda – a dancer and single mother, and Bethlehem – a freelance writer who pays the bills by writing for a tween-oriented celebrity gossip blog. In the chapter, titled “Phat Booty”, Belinda finds out that her pre-teen daughter is actively engaged on the site that Bethlehem writes for. Have a look at the video for yourself.  Check out the entire Left Unsaid series by visiting: http://www.leftunsaidseries.com. I’d recommend starting from the first chapter – I didn’t at first and almost wrote the series off because I didn’t have the proper context.

Also – keep your eyes peeled for Chyna Layne – the girl who played the Jamaican smack-talking sista Rhonda in Precious.

(as seen on Black Web 2.0)

cheers,

k

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