Check out the official trailer for Friends and Strangers, James Vaughan’s gleefully absurdist satire set to open for a one-week exclusive NY engagement at Metrograph In Theater and At Home beginning Friday, February 25.

Starring in the film are Fergus Wilson, Emma Diaz, Steve Maxwell, Poppy Jones and Greg Zimbulis.

Friends and Strangers premiered at the 2021 International Film Festival Rotterdam, and went on to screen at multiple film festivals including 2021 New Directors/New Films and 2021 Jeonju International Film Festival where it won the Special Jury Prize.

Ray and Alice (Fergus Wilson and Emma Diaz), two Australian twentysomethings living cushioned, comfortable lives in affluent Sydney, don’t have any real problems, and that’s their problem. This non-dilemma becomes fodder for wry, incisive comedy of everyday social mortification in writer/director/editor Vaughan’s ennui-drenched Friends and Strangers, in which molehill difficulties—an impromptu camping trip that fails to lead to a desired communion, a series of misunderstandings revolving around a wedding video—take on mountainous significance. A startlingly original piece of work located somewhere at the intersection of screwball and cringe comedy, Antonioniesque alienation, and Rohmerian ravishment, and an exemplary work of art that calls into question the value of art in a modern world that has reduced it to nothing more than a marker of social status.

Watch the official trailer for Friends and Strangers.