Synopsis

Faced with rampant sexual violence on their college campus, a group of Tulane University students spend a year creating an immersive play from their real-life experiences. Building characters and scenes based on the sexual politics of their campus, the student actors confront hard truths.

The film follows this process with a lyrical lens, blurring the lines between reality and performance, moving between verite of campus life and the confessional vulnerability of the rehearsal room.

Posing urgent questions about toxic legacies, trauma and healing, ROLEPLAY explores the roles we play as we grow into who we are: how they hurt us, how they heal us, and how they shape our futures.

STATEMENT From Director Katie Mathews

When I entered college in the mid-2000s, I entered an environment where extremes were normalized: excessive partying, walks of shame, sexist-themed events like “golf pros and tennis hoes”. This was not the world I came from, and yet, figuring out how to fit in felt essential.

Years later, as an adult and professor of American college students myself, I began to recall those years more clearly for their disturbing truths: the sexual violence perpetrated against me and my friends, the codes of silence, the isolation of my friends of color, the homophobia, the way frat boys ruled the social order, and the lack of guidance as we navigated issues like rape, racism, addiction, and trauma.

My work as a filmmaker, qualitative researcher, and educator all springs from the same set of questions: how does our culture shape who we are and how we live? And how can collective action provide avenues for healing ourselves and those cultures? I believe collaborative, communal practices - like the process of making a play - invite us in, render us vulnerable, offer human connection as a salvo for our pain, and open us up to alternative ideas about each other and the world.

ROLEPLAY was a collaboration between a group of brilliant creators in front of and behind the camera, including college students and members of Goat in the Road theater company, to create a play that would explore and confront sexual violence on Tulane University’s campus. Over a year’s time, students created an immersive play out of their real-life experiences. The film is part of a larger interdisciplinary project of the same name that includes a play.

ROLEPLAY takes a unique approach to depict campus culture both visually and in its editorial approach. Rather than relying on the voices of those that have traditionally been viewed as “experts,” ROLEPLAY relies on the voices of the students themselves. The film views intersectionality not just as who is in the room, but as a core lens to illuminate all of the aspects of this culture that promote and excuse violence and hate. The protagonists in the film go beyond the victim-perpetrator binary as they wrestle with the impacts and responsibilities of being implicated in the broader culture of toxicity that leads to sexual assault on campus. The students you will meet in the film are a key part of the creative process, in devising and writing the play (which is now published and of which they are credited authors) and in their feedback on cuts of the film.

ROLEPLAY isn’t a black-and-white investigation of an egregious sexual assault and it isn’t filled with easy answers or an overt call-to-action.  Rather, it immerses audiences in the banal and insidious culture of normalized violence and bias on American college campuses and gives voice to students who are trying to upend those norms in their community. For audiences in college and beyond, we hope the film sparks reflection and provokes conversation.

- Katie Mathews