Welcome to Paris
Director: Al Oxborough
France, 2025, 14 min
Shooting Format:Digital
Festival Year:2026
Category:Narrative Short
Genres:Comedy, Bilingual
Cast:Emmy Wheeler, Mo Collins, Blandine Andrieu, Audrey Daoudal, Ayouba Ali, Ellen Toland
Crew:Writer-Director: Al Oxborough. Producers: Al Oxborough, Eldest Daughter. Editor: Al Oxborough. Cinematographer: Brennan Vance.
Email:allegraoxborough@gmail.com
Synopsis
When American foot model Evie shows up for her first gig in Paris, her employers discover a problem with her feet.
Trailer
About the director
Al is a filmmaker based in Brooklyn, NY and co-founder of production company Eldest Daughter. Their 2018 docu-fiction short, “Distance,” was praised by NoBudge.com for its “intoxicating ability to capture private conversations with dead-on accuracy,” and by a Short of the Week programmer for “Amazing performances and direction.” Al’s recent film works have screened at Academy Award-qualifying festivals and museums worldwide, including the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, LA Shorts International, Brooklyn Film Festival, and Paris Film Week. Al’s consumerist satire, “I Already Went,” premiered in May 2024 at Vienna Shorts International, and their psychological comedy in development, “Portrait,” is a 2025 NYSCA awardee, WeScreenplay’s Shorts Semi-Finalist, and ScreenCraft Film Fund Quarter Finalist. Al’s debut original feature screenplay “Nothing to Hide” won the International Screenwriters’ Association’s Table Read My Screenplay Grand Prize and received a table read at Cannes Marché du Film in 2025, where Al also pitched the feature as part of the Linz International Talent Academy cohort. A queer dark comedy set at a bachelorette party in the suburban Midwest, “Nothing to Hide” is slated for production in September 2026.
Filmmaker's note
I wrote "Welcome to Paris" for my dear friend, Emmy Wheeler (actor, clairvoyant, and real-life sometimes-foot-model). It’s a love letter to all of the creatives in my life: to their perseverance and bravery — against all odds, and in spite of the wear-and-tear of survival jobs. “Welcome to Paris” is about rejection and redemption; about being an artist, and striving. It's an anxious and tender story, which plays with cross-cultural misunderstandings and assumptions, and wholly American concepts around what it means to be good and pure.