Scheduled to premiere at this year’s Glasgow Film Festival, Sarah Galea-Davis’s The Players is a compelling coming-of-age tale to keep your eye on. The film follows 15-year-old Emily (Stefani Kimber) in the summer of 1994 as she navigates the power dynamics of her surrogate family, an avant-garde theatre company putting on a new production of Hamlet. As her biological family falls apart due to her parents’ divorce, Emily need for attention and love makes her more vulnerable to the toxicity of the company’s director, Reinhardt (Eric Johnson) and his risky, inappropriate instructions and rules. Goaded on and enabled by other group members, Emily’s newly adopted creative environment quickly becomes unbalanced and dangerous. When the pressure mounts, the question becomes, will Emily stick to the script or extricate and save herself?
Based on Galea-Davis’s own teen acting experiences, The Players is an evocative study of manipulation and enablement set in a time long before #MeToo or any reckoning of abuses of power and the need for safe and appropriate spaces.
Tune in below to the first teaser trailer for the drama now:
The Players is set to have its international premiere March 6, before heading to theatres later this year.