When home becomes your entire world, familiar rooms can begin to feel like separate realities. Fracta takes that unease into psychological horror, turning the isolation of the COVID years into a confrontation with a frightening version of the self.
Director and co-writer Monica Taddei and co-writer, producer and editor Luca Zappala built the Papertown Films short around a limited window of opportunity and the talents of their collaborators. Hannah Hornsby’s physical performance anchors the film, while cinematography, visual effects, colour and Nicole Lee’s score help blur the boundaries between inner experience and the world around her.
Selected for JCIFF Presents: Nightmares, Fracta brings a story born from confinement to Jersey City’s independent film community. Taddei and Zappala spoke with WAJ Magazine about the title, their overlapping creative roles and the lingering questions they hope audiences take home.
The Interview
What first inspired Fracta during or after the COVID years?
"Fracta" emerged from an elaboration of the COVID experiences. Seeing people falling to pieces in isolation, their daily world exploded in many pieces in their own homes, where the kitchen table becomes the office or the restaurant or the school. And then retreating in their own world and having to confront their darkest inner self and fight it for self preservation.
It also was pushed by a strange set of events: several professionals in the film world had time in their hands (an utter rarity!) due to the Writers Guild of America strike that had created lulls and delays in the productions. All of a sudden very talented and usually busy professionals had time. We thought we had to take the chance and do something straight away with whatever we had available at the moment. It was a few weeks window of opportunity that could close all of a sudden. Suddenly all the impressions accumulated during Covid congealed into a simple but intentional script and we threw ourselves into making it happen. We were extremely lucky to find Hannah Hornsby, a very talented actor whose specialization in physical theater was particularly valuable since she was in the unique position of acting with a non existent other actor... that also happened to be herself.
What does the title signify?
"Fracta" literally means broken, shattered, fractured, form the Latin "frangere". It's the fragmentation and explosion of our daily world when it gets concentrated in a small place. Every corner becomes a different landscape, a different context. The self and its reality is dispersed across multiple small places in the confined space. Each pocket, each area, each room, becomes a world of its own that echoes ours.
Why approach isolation and fractured identity through horror?
I always thought that isolation would be just horrible. But is has the potential of becoming horrific. We are social creatures, we are wired to be together and live in shared spaces. This was not just isolation but an odd form of voluntary and necessary confinement. Horror is usually used as a great expressive way to convey our fear of the unknown or the unexplained, but we thought it could also be used to convey the disquiet of isolation. Fracta is probably more of a psychological thriller than a horror piece, but I think we can all agree that meeting our own dark self is in isolation is frightening.
Solitude is very different, it can be sought, desired and it can expand our selves. It can make us revert to our fantasy and imagination. Let me just quote Wordsworth, "The daffodils": "For oft, when on my couch I lie, In vacant or in pensive mood,They flash upon that inward eye, Which is the bliss of solitude, And then my heart with pleasure fills, And dances with daffodils". There are no daffodils here, just floating memories of a world that is not accessible anymore.
Monica, how did your post-production background inform your directing?
Good question: I knew what issues might crop up down the line, and knowing really saved us a lot of trouble! Having experience on the other side of the film production line is very valuable.
Since WAJ is also about entrepreneurship, I want to underline how hands-on experience with what comes next, or at least doing research, can really help a project.
Also, the extensive post-production experience Luca brought, coming from the industry as a visual effects supervisor for feature films and episodic TV, helped with planning and capturing data.
He 3D scanned the actor's limbs, head and props in case we might need them for the Visual effects shots. Those were not defined yet, but it's good to obtain the pieces you might need when possible. He also captured HDRI images needed for CGI elements, added tracking markers for creating virtual cameras, and gathered measurements and camera data, as well as lens grid plates. It is much easier not to use them later on than to scramble to obtain them at a later date, or indeed compromise.
Luca, how did writing, producing, shooting and editing overlap creatively?
The process was surprisingly smooth and fluid. I often wear multiple hats and connect dots to make things happen. The timing of events also led to a nice and linear flow where I never overlapped too many roles at once. We started with a development approach without a definitive deadline in mind. Writing went through multiple drafts with Monica and I collaborating organically. This part required minimal producing.
When Rami Bartholdy, an extremely skilled cinematographer, joined us and his availability was very limited to a small window, and this aligned to Hannah’s and ours, Monica and I decided that it was the time to go ahead.
This gave us two weeks of pre-production, and, all of a sudden, I was drawn to producing, out of necessity, and this became a driving force that stayed with me ever since.
The shoot was relatively simple, given that we used a single main location. I would multitask, for instance preparing the call sheets and managing logistics each night, storing and reviewing footage with Monica. During the day I would collaborate with Rami and co-DOP the film, and be the VFX Supervisor when needed.
Having Jack Sabrosa as production assistant and VFX Data Wrangler helped the process massively.
I edited the film out of necessity as multiple editor candidates were unable to join due to schedule conflicts. Teaching Film Production and VFX at UCL, I was lucky to have access to industry colleagues who kindly offered feedback and their advice helped tightening the edit to its final form.
Finally, I discovered and connected through Reddit with a young, interesting and talented film composer from Taiwan, Nicole Lee. Nicole not only wrote all the score for Fracta but also had the chance to have it played and recorded by the ERO (European Recording Orchestra) through the school she was attending as scholarship recipient, the prestigious Film Scoring Academy of Europe. I was lucky again when I met the colourist Daniel De Villiers, also through Reddit, another miraculously talented person, this time from South Africa, who carefully crafted the mood with us. He then graciously introduced us to Michael and Reece of Levelhead Studio (Sound design and Mix) and we could not be happier to know they were bringing in their talent for sound into the mix. Working with sound was a revealing experience; suddenly the scenes were coming to life and acquired a new taste.
Post production was very organic and flexible as well. I would spend 50% of the time editing and 50% of the time producing and pushing post-production. After locking the edit, It then evolved to 50% visual effects and 50% producing.
Of course, all of the above was only possible with the keen eye, support and vision of Monica, who oversaw the creative side and maintained a coherent vision.
How did Hannah Hornsby develop the character’s psychological arc?
We asked Hannah directly to answer this question, I'll report here her answer: "It was an interesting opportunity to play a person meeting herself in such an unnatural way. I understood the original girl to be experiencing paranoia and agoraphobia, and imagined that, in killing her double, she was also attempting to erase a shadow part of herself. This made the violence both an act of self-preservation and a form of self-destruction. The psychological arc became a struggle not simply against another person, but against a meeker, more naive part of herself that she could not accept."
How did cinematography, recurring visuals, and Nicole Lee’s music distinguish dream from reality?
In her own words: "The score navigates between clear tonal intentions and atonal, clustered harmonies to create an underlying sense of instability. By pairing aggressive performance techniques—such as double bass sul ponticello - with dreamlike elements like harp glissandos, the music builds a stark contrast that evokes a feeling of spatial and emotional misplacement". In terms of cinematography, we are big fans of long shots and justified cuts. This, by the way, allowed breathing space for Hannah’s physical performance to take place. We opted for cold cyan-blue colours for the living room and the real world to give a sense of clinical entrapment. Whereas, the supernatural hole on the floor and on the ceiling appear in the corridor with warm/mustard like colours. We broke this rule as the girl’s reality and dream collide and mix, culminating in both sides of her character interacting in the living room.
What challenges did you navigate together?
One of the biggest challenges was maintaining consistency and bringing the film to completion while navigating life-changing events and other professional and personal commitments. Monica's parents were both diagnosed with dementia and that added a layer of psychological unease and practical difficulty. Independent filmmaking requires a great deal of perseverance, especially when you're juggling several things at once. Keeping the project moving forward, finding the time and energy to see it through, and making sure it remained true to our original vision was a challenge.
What do you hope viewers discuss after watching?
We love this question. You become so busy writing it and completing your short that you forget what you would like the viewers to discuss after watching... The whole truth? We hope they do not understand straight away but that it keeps nagging at them, at the back of their head, a lingering thought, a little faded memory that hopefully leads to some realization about their own dark self, their own inward eye revealing their own dark unacknowledged thoughts.
What does JCIFF selection mean to Papertown Films, and what’s next?
When we saw “Jersey City” alongside the word “independent” in the name of a film festival, we were already sold. We had been exploring New Jersey's cinematic heritage, and when we came across JCIFF, we thought it would be the perfect fit.
When we received the nomination, it felt as though there had been a kind of soul connection, so to speak. We were delighted, and we felt it would also underline the universality of the film's message.
As a small European production, you sometimes worry that your film might be seen as just another art-house old-country short: unusual enough to be noticed, perhaps, but familiar enough to get lost among so many others. That's why a nomination in the US felt particularly meaningful to us. And New Jersey was especially appealing. There is something about its cinematic heritage, its distinctive locations and the sheer variety of stories and cultures that have shaped its identity that made us feel Fracta could find a different kind of resonance there, beyond the familiar context of European art-house cinema.
There is also an interesting contrast at play. Fracta is a small, claustrophobic film, produced in the Old Country, where the outside world seems to have shrunk to the walls of a home. New Jersey, by contrast, evokes a vast and varied cinematic landscape, shaped by its iconic locations, cultural diversity and the many stories that emerge from different communities. We felt that this contrast made Jersey City a particularly fitting place for the film: a story born out of confinement finding a home in a place associated with openness, movement and the meeting of different worlds.
An official selection of JCIFF Presents: Nightmares. Explore the festival and viewing details.
