Follow Back
After discovering a stranger’s livestream, I lived for a month under his balcony. As he watched me, I watched him back until following turned into desire, exposure, and an unexpected encounter. The video performance intertwines my physical and digital interactions with a stranger, blurring the boundaries between public and private, virtual and physical, seen and unseen. Combining livestream footage, personal street documentation, social media traces, and voiceover narration Follow Back reflects on intimacy, surveillance, loneliness and queer desire in public space. (Rom Sheratzky)
21st-century technology enables and accelerates a timeless bout of amour fou in Rom Sheratzky's disarmingly direct debut, which dances along the hazardously porous documentary/fiction border with nonchalant, spry aplomb. It's a "desktop film" of simplicity and originality: an unapologetic, confessional blizzard that makes us feel more co-conspirator than mere viewer.
Sheratzky engagingly recounts the emotional rollercoaster he experienced in the hot, torrid summer of 2024 after moving to Frankfurt for MA studies. Germany's financial hub, that most impersonal of all major EU cities, provides a leafy but otherwise drolly incongruous backdrop for Sheratzky's rapid-burgeoning obsession.
The unwitting target of his fascination: the shadowy camera owner, the online feed from whose balcony-mounted livestream webcam the lonely Sheratzky stumbles across when acclimatising to his new environment. This one-way love-affair takes exponentially unexpected turns as the lovelorn filmmaker seeks 'IRL' contact via increasingly imaginative means...
The exact nature of the correspondence between the film's reality and actual 'reality,' however, remains teasingly opaque. Is the whole thing an elaborate construct, or a nakedly autobiographical approach or some unclassifiable, idiosyncratic combo of the two?
The viewer's involvement with such tricky matters is cemented by Sheratzky's irresistible, chatty humour, which — in tandem with his delicious deployment of bygone-era romantic pop-classics — turns an essentially melancholic tale of online anomie and creepily persistent stalking into a stealthy, affecting miniature of pleasurably acidic sweetness. (Neil Young)
Follow Back
2025
Austria, Germany
23 min