Jane Schoenbrun: Public Access Afterworld

Join us as we celebrate the release of Jane Schoenbrun’s debut novel Public Access Afterworld with a reading by Jesse Williams and a rare screening of their early films A Self-Induced Hallucination and The School Is Watching.

It’s the 12th June 2009 when David Sawyer and Erin Morrison, two lonely TV-obsessed suburban teens, gather in Erin’s basement to watch TV’s analogue-to-digital transition. Beneath the static that follows, Erin catches a glimpse of a mysterious broadcast from a TV network called ‘Public Access Afterworld’. Soon after, she vanishes. Fourteen years later, Bethany Peters is toiling through the night shift at megacorp GlobalVill’s bleak Austin campus. A trans content moderator, she spends her evenings reviewing an endless stream of horror. But gradually a pattern emerges in the form of a young streamer, Jules, calling out the same words: Public Access Afterworld. When Bethany ignores the guidance of her corporate overseers and sets out to rescue Jules, she begins an epic journey that sweeps from rural Texas, through the heart of American darkness in 1940s Los Alamos and all the way back to that basement, where David and Erin first encountered a world at the edges of reality itself.

These films inhabit and emerge from a new esoteric internet culture that is haunted by the static of a bygone analogue age, and show flickerings of themes that Jane explores further in I Saw The TV Glow and Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.

Jesse Williams is a Brighton-based writer, director & composer, known for her tender, heartfelt and bold stories of LGBTQ+ community. Proud of her identity as a trans woman, she is driven by an aim to represent the unrepresented, to foster empathy through her filmmaking through a visceral and humanist style aiming to combine powerful visual storytelling with raw emotional authenticity. Her most recent short 'Chaser' is her most ambitious, personal and brave short to date, channeling the spirit of contemporary trans cinema through gritty British Social Realism to tell a gripping tale of trans nightlife.

The Final Film Festival showcases new independent and restoration premieres in London.