Lulu
At VIGILNT, a company contracted to determine whether illicit images involving minors are real or AI generated, a new employee becomes convinced that one image, tagged as artificial, is actually real and spirals into a dark obsession
Nick, a young content moderator, joins the child verification department at VIGILNT, a company that analyzes explicit images online to determine if they are real or not. The job is emotionally draining. Sex, drugs and alcohol abuse in the office are rampant, as a way to cope. Nick, however, is doing remarkably well, until he notices a peculiar phenomenon - multiple images of the same little girl dubbed Lulu. Nick goes to extremes to find out the truth, threatening his career and wellbeing.
Director's note
Lulu is а techno drama that aims to explore the effects that the recent advances in AI are having on society. It presents a future profession and the harrowing effects it could have on those who choose it as their vocation.
It is a story about trauma, corporate apathy, the erosion of reality and the consequences they can have on regular people. My hope with Lulu is to raise awareness to the lack of systems of care in place for the most vulnerable age groups - children.
Lulu is conceived as a small budget film. The vast majority of the action is set in one location - an open floor bright colorful office that contrasts with the horror of the work being performed there. The lighting is soft and naturalistic. The frame composition is slightly uneven, as to subtly imply that there is something wrong.
I have a personal connection to the story as my best friend, a director in his own right, worked at a content moderation office and I could see his mental health spiralling.
Producer's note
Lulu marks my fourth collaboration with writer-director-composer Angel Radev who has consistently proven himself to be a filmmaker unafraid of formal risk - someone who experiments with structure, time, and rhythm to push genre storytelling into more unsettling territory.
His work explores the state of obsession and spiralling that often tests his characters’ limits, and his ability to stretch time creates a poetic ghostliness. In LULU, that sensibility finds its most urgent expression yet.
I have a growing concern about the speed at which technological systems are introduced into everyday life without corresponding structures of care or protection for the people operating within them. As AI and automated systems become increasingly embedded in society, responsibility is quietly displaced from corporations to individuals, from institutions to workers - often without protective measures in place.
Lulu responds to a gap - not as a manifesto, but as a human story.