By: Valerie Milano
Los Angeles, CA (The Hollywood Times) 8/24/2024 – In his film Teleport, writer/director Dustn Curtis Murphy imagines a dystopian future where forbidden love carries the ultimate price, and back-alley deals can buy you the use of teleportation technology to escape.
Ekaterina and Anya are lovers on the run from the authorities with the power to eliminate them on sight. They are desperate to escape and turn to a shady teleporter, and when he tells them the price for two trips beyond their means financially, the women must choose.
Should they stay together and try to escape over the border on foot, or separate, sending one of them ahead to get ready for the other? The choice is made and one of the women become involved with an insidious network of human traffickers who supply young girls to Britain’s top politicians.
In an exclusive interview with The Hollywood Times, Murphy said it was not difficult to imagine such a future in light of what is happening all around the world.
Click below to see our exclusive interview:
“My favorite pieces of Sci-Fi are pieces that hod up a mirror to society and are pieces of social commentary,” he said. “Kind of a peek into a very plausible future as a sin of warning.”
Murphy pointed to a long tradition of science fiction that rings the bell for a quite dystopian future – 1984, Brave New World Fahrenheit 451.
“My film is definitely I line with those type of films,” he said. “Sometimes we look back at those books now, even though they were done 80 years ago, and we see how they were predictions of the future, and a lot of them have unfortunately come true.”
The story drives the imagination, but it is the characters Ekaterina (Therica Wilson-Read) and Anya (Borislava Stratieva) who breathe life into it and make it as compelling as it is thought-provoking. Murphy said this was his first experience collaborating with Wlson-Read and Stratieva on this film, Wilson-Read coming on board through a producer and mutual acting friend.
Murphy said he met Stratieva as the Raindance Film Festival and “we had an idea that she could audition for the role. She auditioned and we never looked at anybody else after that,” he said.
Teleport was produced by Murphy, Addy Raja and Chris Kyriacou, associate producer Alasdair C. Melrose, and executive producers Romain Barbey and Simon Menkes.
The film collected four wins and five nominations in festival showings, including the Best Director prize for Murphy at the Unrestricted View Film Festival, Best Feature film at the Romford Film Festival, and Best Sci-Fi Feature at the Flickers’ Rhode Island International Film Festival.
