Roleplay

ROLEPLAY follows a year in the life of a group of students at Tulane University as they use their lived experiences to create a play that confronts the rampant sexual violence on their college campus. ROLEPLAY is not an investigation of a single sexual assault, nor is it the story of student activists taking on an institution, rather ROLEPLAY brings to life the insidious culture of normalized sexual assault, and gives voice to a group of students who seek to upend these norms in their community and in themselves.

ROLEPLAY weaves together different layers to tell the story of multiple processes: healing, creating, and growing up. The film juxtaposes intimate rehearsals with powerful student interviews and vivid verité from student’s lives on campus. These juxtapositions create tension and muddy the lines between reality and performance: as the year progresses, students step more deeply into their own agency and creative power, writing storylines that reveal just how deeply the characters they’ve created reflect their own struggles.

Posing urgent questions about the toxic legacies imparted on the next generation, ROLEPLAY is an artful and immersive film about the roles we play as we’re growing up: how they hurt us, how they heal us, and how they shape who we become.

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Katie Mathews is a filmmaker whose work explores the grey areas and liminal spaces between self and culture, home and community, healing and regeneration. She is currently directing the feature documentary Roleplay about art’s power to transform toxic culture, chosen for the 2021 Gotham Documentary Lab. She recently co-directed an audio-first experimental short called Signal and Noise about the sounds of Guantánamo Bay Detention Center and wrote and directed a fiction short called Dark Moon about Dementia and caregiving. Previously, Katie produced and story edited Mossville, (Dir. Alex Glustrom) a feature documentary about environmental racism that premiered at Full Frame where it won the Human Rights Award. She also directed and produced Post Coastal, an NEA and Smithsonian-funded documentary series about Louisiana coastal communities and climate change. Her work has screened at festivals around the world including DOC NYC, Full Frame, Raindance & Mountainfilm, on PBS, and at the United Nations. She was a 2018 Fellow in the inaugural Southern Producers Lab, a 2019 Fellow in the Points North Fellowship and Pitch, and is a 2022 Princess Grace Award winner for Film. She holds a BA from Northwestern University and an MFA from Hunter College in Integrated Media Arts.

Robin Schwartz is a film editor whose feature credits include, FATHOM, winner of a news and doc Emmy; OVER THE RAINBOW, chosen for Film Comment's Selects; and Emmy nominees LEGION OF BROTHERS, and THE GREAT INVISIBLE, a SXSW Grand Jury winner which she co-edited. She was also co-editor on THE BIGGEST LITTLE FARM: THE RETURN. Her previous narrative work includes the Sundance film RESULTS, directed by Andrew Bujalski. She is a recipient of the 40 under 40 award for emerging talent in Documentary from DOC NYC, and a JACKSON WILD editing award finalist.