One of the most exciting and innovative shorts programs Tribeca is proud to offer this year is FML, a collection of seven films that each deal with issues of modern technology. Using different tones, techniques, and stories, these films place their characters in precarious, tech-related circumstances, providing unique, in-depth looks at the way we live now. This thought-provoking program has been curated for a contemporary audience that is always online and can relate to the vital question, “Does technology rule, or does it just rule us?”

As Director of Shorts Programming  Sharon Badal puts it, “We didn’t intentionally set out to make the program, but [in watching the submissions] there seemed to be a trend of directors creating work about the effects of technology on how we live and communicate. And so as we began to find our favorites, we felt inspired to put them all together.”

In a particularly cool twist, global film lovers who might not be able to make it to New York for the 2015 Festival can still screen these films online through  tribecafilm.com/online a mere three hours after their premieres, opening up the festival to a wider audience and making these movies as accessible and user-friendly as the technologies featured within them. “This program has to be online,” Badal says, “because that’s where this audience lives.”

The seven films featured in FML include:

 SEE FESTIVAL SCREENING TIMES HERE. 

Luke LoCurcio’s Aphasia centers around Emily, a texting-addicted, Facebook-surfing, delivery-ordering 26-year-old who strikes up a friendly online flirtation with a musician that soon devolves into a horrific twist;

Wen Ren’s Cafe Glass surveys an internet-related catastrophe within a not-so-distant future of wearable hi-tech and detached online dating, seen literally through the eyes of a frustrated student, and told with equal parts ribaldry and romance;

Jack Marchetti’s The Evolution of a Gen-X Music Purchaser provides a clever and tuneful glimpse at how music-purchasing technology has changed over the last twenty years as seen through the formative moments of one die-hard consumer;

Saïd Belktibia’s Ghettotube is a dark and unflinching look at two housing project teenagers’ quest to achieve their “fifteen seconds of fame” by making a video of a staged bus assault in order to satisfy the ever-growing hunger for online violence;

Mark Kunerth’s The Girlfriend Experience follows an average, lovelorn guy who gets more than he ever expected while browsing the web in this zesty, witty look at online hookup culture and the expectations that come with such easy access;

Crazy Pictures’ Like focuses much-needed attention on the major epidemic of bullying and online accountability in the digital age, as a disturbed social outlier goes on a destructive mission to take down an innocent blogger;

and Roja Gashtili’s and Julia Lerman’s Rita Mahtoubian is Not a Terrorist offers a sly commentary on issues of security and government surveillance via the misinterpreted mishaps of its utterly sweet and winningly sincere Iranian-born heroine.