The film raises pertinent issues that have always been of extreme importance when it comes to the human condition and the fate of humanity, but more so in contemporary times when each horror of every atrocity committed is available for consumption on our myriad screens. The narratorial approach to the same thematic concerns is interesting and experimental. 
 
A man records a video essay about two films, ‘The Zone of Interest’ and ‘The Nasty Girl’, and utilizes it to comment on the ideas of kindness, cruelty, and mankind’s implicit and complicit behavioral patterns when it comes to them. It asserts that the distractions of modern society further enable the nurturing of cold indifference and damaging distancing from empathy and sympathy. 

As this film within a film unfolds, the protagonist himself attempts to escape a terrible fate of mortal peril that constantly makes its presence felt. The final result remains especially notable in the creative as well as the visual approaches it adopts to share all of this, developing alongside a dedicated, impassioned performance.

Indifference | Short Film Nominee

The short film endeavours a social commentary on the contemporary state of affairs in the US, soon branching out to how the same issues plague the whole world, and all of us collectively as a society. It spares no one in its sharp approach adopted to engage with the concerns. All of these views are presented forth while being veiled as a documentary that exists within a fictive space, one which has no qualms about revealing its intentions. It declares politicians and people in positions of power vampires who have recently come forward and revealed their true identity. 

 The blood-sucking demons of fantasy and folklore, thus, now become metaphors for those who are sucking the life force of society, financially and otherwise, leaving their victims lifeless or struggling to survive. The conversation ropes in several names to support the critique - from Oscar Wilde to Noam Chomsky to Rutger Bregman, to name a few. In the process, the viewer is left with an exhaustive engagement with capitalism, economic development and its ramifications on different sections of society, debt, profit - the nature, the burden and the curse of it all. 

 Though initially it might appear that despite the declaration of several exploitative forces and individuals to be vampires, the film maintains a tone of satirical objectivity, it soon makes it clear which side of the conversation it has located itself on. Citing the French historical drama La Commune (Paris, 1871) as one of its inspirations, Vampires, They Exist?! remains simple in its approach throughout, coming across as a sincere effort, albeit in need of a little more fine-tuning on the level of narrative construction, to tell its own individual story.

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