Director: Sarah Lasley

Film: Welcome to the Enclave

Bio: Two Texas sisters fled to the metaverse at the onset of the pandemic, creating The Enclave, a cyber-haven for ‘like-minded women’. Years later, the suburb is on the verge of bankruptcy, and owner Moni Calvioni is crowdfunding to save her digital utopia. With no awareness of online culture, she and her sister Blair turn to Twitch and Reddit to pitch their idealized vision only to fall prey to a slew of internet trolls who write profanities on their street signs and graffiti their walls with sexual imagery. The rapidly encroaching digital mountainscape only further unravels the delusion of The Enclave’s pursuit for the white, suburban ideal and exposes the baggage we bring to online spaces if we don’t fix our very real IRL problems.

Sarah Lasley is an award-winning filmmaker from Louisville, Kentucky and an Assistant Professor of Film at Cal Poly Humboldt. She has screened internationally at festivals, museums, galleries, and universities such as the Cucalorus Film Festival, Cairo Video Festival, 25 FPS Film Festival, Katonah Museum of Art, and the Wrong Bienniale. She holds an MFA from Yale School of Art and a BFA from University of Louisville and was a resident at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2004.