Acts of Kindness
Director: Ben Strebel
Cast:Sam Spruell, Mia Tharia, Hannah Steele
Crew:Writer: Cordelia Lynn. Producer: Polly Du Plessis. Editor: Paul Watts; Cinematographer: Tibor Dingelstad; Executive Producer: Emily Harris, Harland Weiss, Shawn Lacy, Noam Murro, Laura Regan, Polly du Plessis
Email:emily@opc.tv
Synopsis
A student and her tutor sit in an office, navigating the end of their illicit affair. As they circle their wounds, reality fractures, revealing a new world with a shifting balance of power.
About the director
Ben Strebel is a British-Swiss filmmaker based in London.
Ben’s narrative short Land’s End (2019) was funded by Creative England and premiered at the London Short Film Festival, before enjoying a festival run that included selections at BFI Flare, Q Fest St. Louis and Inside Out. Acts of Kindness (2025), Ben’s sophomore short, was completed this year and is currently in festival consideration for its world premiere. Based on Ben’s original idea, this film was written by renowned playwright Cordelia Lynn and stars Mia Tharia (Klara and the Sun) and Sam Spruell (The Thing with Feathers, Fargo, The Settlers, Legend).
Filmmaker's note
From the very beginning of my directing career, I have noticed tensions surrounding intersections of power - sex, gender, race, age, class - on set. These played out vividly for me eight years ago when I directed my first short. The story follows two male protagonists from very different backgrounds who embark on a road trip, encountering love and betrayal. We cast a young, up and coming actor and an older established one. Before we even started filming tensions ran high in the rehearsal room when the veteran actor felt his character didn’t have enough prominence. He took it upon himself to punish the female writer, the younger actor, and female members of crew throughout the shoot. In the face of his seniority as an experienced actor, and my status as a first time director, I felt a total lack of power in dealing with the situation.
Years later I bumped into the same actor who confided in me his ‘cancel story’. Whilst filming a billion-dollar TV series he had improvised a physical move on his co-star and consequently was fired. I was first astonished and then fascinated by his ambivalence about this act; one that had sorely transgressed the consensual lines and ethics of performance, but that in his view was necessary to make the scene feel authentic, i.e. to make great art. This central tension sparked the concept of ‘Acts of Kindness.’
One of the main dynamics in his story was not just consent, but gendered violence. I consequently wanted to work with a female writer and approached the renowned British, feminist playwright, Cordelia Lynn. Having been to see her impressively idiosyncratic and highly nuanced exploration of complex family dynamics in her play ‘Sea Creatures’, I knew she would be an incredible collaborator. She is unafraid of interrogating the knottiness and difficulty surrounding the debates around cancellation culture and the current post-mortem of the Me-Too movement. We sparked instantly, with a shared fascination for forensic explorations of ethics and the complexities that lie at the heart of these conversations.
Set both at the end of a student / teacher affair, and as part of a tense film shoot, our film, ‘Acts of Kindness’, is as interested in exposing the hypocrisies and appetites of a culture which demands excellence, authenticity and profit at all costs, as it is in exploring the impulses of individuals who strive to answer the question: what is acceptable in the pursuit of making great art? This is a question we hope to continue to explore in developing the short into a feature.
With warmest regards,
Ben & Cordelia