SF ShortsSF Shorts

Anyone At All
Winner of Jury Prize
“A cinematically sensuous character study, established and motivated with beautiful efficiency and stoic insight.” – F3 Film Magazine
Anyone At All  US  Narrative   
A sleep-deprived, late-night, security guard suffers under the weight of an imagined, Elvis-like presence and falls deeper into a world of his own creation.
DIRECTOR PROFILE
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Eliza Loyola
Director Bio :
Eliza is an Oakland born filmmaker currently based in Los Angeles. She was awarded the Innovation and Research Fellowship from the Cleveland Museum of Art to create a film grounded in the museum’s archives as well as XArt's grant to make her following film in Prague. Eliza also directs ad content while studying at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts where she is working on her first feature.

Director Statement :
I’ve always been fascinated by the internal worlds of others. Understanding the ways in which people interpret the world better describes who they are than any accumulation of facts about their identities could. Anyone at all is a film about a state of mind, where a quixotic Elvis impersonator re-imagines the world around him, transforming the mundane into the sublime.

My interest in the act of impersonation stems from my own first grade performance of “Blue Suede Shoes”. I stood before my class in sideburns and aviators, lip-syncing the song to evade the horrifying prospect of having to read my presentation aloud. Little did I know that this performance would find poetic expression eighteen years later when I wrote Anyone At All.

Just after I moved from Oakland to Los Angeles, I wrote the script. I missed the communal landscape of my city and was put off by the gates that separated private from public space. In L.A., the wealthiest homes and humblest apartments are fenced off from the street. This proclivity towards barriers applies not only to physical space but also to the separation between “private life” and public persona in L.A., the city that is home to the entertainment industry.

Ideas about fractured selves and spaces found their way into the film, in which a security guard on the night shift stands watch over the barrier between public and private property. His loneliness and lack of community are put into relief when the boundary between external and internal self becomes increasingly difficult for him to safeguard. As a spectral Elvis figure begins visiting the main character, he finds himself overcome with a desire to inhabit a persona that so promises sociality, visibility, and recognition. Anyone At All digs into the inner life of a character teeming with the desire to transform his reality through the power of imagination.