Andrew Ginger/Likes Dogs

Everything in Amile’s life is the same dull note. He’s bored with his job, his friends, himself… that is, until he meets the doting Andrew on an online dating app. Amile quickly falls head over heels for a man he’s never met, seen, or spoken to. A modern fable about the delirium and disillusionment that can accompany dating in the digital age.

Amber Rose McNeill is an Australian film director and appropriated media artist based in Wisconsin. Her work focuses on societal attitudes towards violence, dark psychology and challenging normative concepts of sexuality. Amber Rose frequently examines the relationship that media and popular culture play in the consumption of violence within western society. Her current projects serve to rework traditional structures within the horror genre to further queer narratives in addition to creating more films made via the female, and gender queer, lens. Director Statement

As a queer filmmaker Amber Rose McNeill wanted to make a horror film where the default heteronormative relationship was discarded and a gay couple inhabited the lead roles. Not as a major statement about queerness within the film’s narrative, but rather for their queerness to be a natural part of the characters. Her aim was to create fully developed queer characters that interact and relate to each other in a genuine way with nuanced, idiosyncratic and at times flawed personality traits. Queer horror is slowly making its way into mainstream horror cinema, but queer horror films are still primarily written and directed by cisgender, heterosexual men rather than being created by queer filmmakers. There is also often the issue of straight men being cast in queer roles, which is why it was important to me to cast queer actors for this film.

Essentially, she wanted to make a short horror film that comments on the risks associated with meeting people in the digital age. Andrew Ginger/Likes Dogs also dips into the loneliness that internet hookup culture creates and the ways in which we can often ignore the red flagged realities within online relationships because we are so starved for intimacy in real life.