We’re big fans of filmmaker/musician/actress/podcaster Lola Blanc around these parts. Her work with Fatale Collective has been justly celebrated on this site, and when she asked if we’d be interested in debuting her new directorial effort “Trust Me,” that was an easy “hell yes” from Team Fango.
Fittingly sharing a name with Blanc’s cult-centric podcast, “Trust Me” is a story about abuse, manipulation, and control, and presents a complex scenario between the protagonist (Blanc) and a man (Morgan Davidsen), rendered in delicate brush strokes. And then… well, why tell you? See what happens for yourself.
Blanc sent along some liner notes for the piece:
“When we were finishing the song (produced by Jeremy Dawson & David Burris), I got this image of a brutalist, minimalist, isolated place in my head and I became kind of obsessed with the idea of that place and what would happen there. I’d been planning to have someone else direct a video for me because it’s so much harder to direct yourself, but my film brain turned on and it felt like it had to be me. And I knew I wasn’t going to find anywhere like that in California — at least nothing we’d ever be able to afford — so I started looking in Europe just to see. I happened to find this incredible remote house in Norway, and then got connected with Silje Baer of Ferdi Film in Oslo, who produced the project and helped me pull off something I would never have been able to do without them.
“I started writing the script and it became a story about indoctrination, a controlling relationship, and a character who’s questioning the reality she’s been living in. I guess it makes sense that that’s where the story took me — this is the kind of thing I talk about on my podcast every week, and it’s something I’ve experienced firsthand, albeit under very different circumstances.
“We’re all capable of believing unbelievable things. Even when a small part of us senses that something is wrong, it’s so easy to disbelieve those parts of ourselves. And it’s that process of waking up into reality, and realizing nothing is what you thought, that I really wanted to convey.”
Mission accomplished, we’d say.
You can keep up with Lola Blanc’s various endeavors on her Instagram account.
