Courtesy of the Woodstock Film Festival

Delilah Napier’s ’19 and Lucy Powers’s ’19 feature film “Floating Carousel” premiered Friday at the Woodstock Film Festival and won the “Ultra Indie” award.

The film is a dark comedy that draws upon their shared stories and their friends’ experiences navigating the modern-day dating scene of New York City.

“Floating Carousel” was inspired by a “freakish coincidence” in 2021, when Napier and Powers both downloaded the dating app Hinge and “had the exact same date with the exact same man within four days of each other,” according to Napier.

“We realized he followed this psychopathically manipulated routine, and he had his script down to a T,” Napier said. “It was the eeriness of that, and how we thought that bled into so many patterns in our lives and modern dating experiences.”

While “Floating Carousel” is the pair’s most recent collaboration, it is far from their first.

Napier and Powers’s collaboration began during their undergraduate years at Yale. Both majoring in theater and performance studies, the two met on the first day of their first year and were in “a bunch of classes and eight plays together,” Powers said.

For their senior thesis project, Napier and Powers decided to co-create a film.

“At the time, no one had done that yet at all. We justified it because we made our movie about theater students putting on a play at Yale. It was based on a true story from students in 2014,” Powers said. “That bonded us together as collaborators completely.”

Together, they directed, wrote, and starred in the film “Voyeur,” which went on to win best U.S. feature film and an audience award at the 2020 SoHo International Film Festival.

Their collaborative projects continued post-graduation with the short film “The Compound” in 2021 and the comedy “Victor Versus the Metaverse” in 2022.

“Having met at Yale, we now have so much shared history and people in common, so it’s nice to share a common vernacular of stories and people when we’re writing together,” Napier said. 

“Floating Carousel” centers around the prevalence of app culture in the modern-day dating scene, and how these apps have created a “transaction” within relationships, Napier said. 

“We’re trying to explore this idea of having all these people all around you, but these fake intimacies sometimes make us feel closer than we are,” Powers said.

Napier added that these “fake intimacies” also make us “feel lonelier than we are.”

Although the film grapples with loneliness, it was created through Napier’s and Powers’ partnership. The film weaves together numerous stories and characters, which they said were often inspired by real occurrences.

The characters embody a range of different personalities — “a Gender Studies masters student, a messy philanderer, an in-denial Sugar Baby, an aspiring cabaret artist, and a professional cuddler” — who all find themselves caught in a “web of dystopian dating scenarios,” according to the film’s press release. 

Actor Glori Dei Filippone, who described their character Alex as “a Gender Studies masters student who isn’t afraid to leverage her sexuality to get what she wants,” hopes that audiences are able to find a bit of themselves within the film. 

“The film forces you to think about your own inner life and makes you recognize that even with the shortcomings of being human, we’re all worthy of love and connection,” Filippone wrote in an email to the News.

Ultimately, Napier and Powers said they hope to capture the gray areas within human experiences by presenting darker themes through a lighthearted, satirical lens.

“We really want there to be comedy and levity at the heart of our work always because we think that actually coming together, laughing at things that are scarily familiar to people is how we can connect and talk about some of the weird things we’re experiencing today,” reflected Powers.

The Woodstock Film Festival was founded in 2000.