DEAR [NAME], the four-minute short film, takes the familiar language of corporate rejection and turns it into a spoken-word performance about what remains after the inbox has moved on: self-doubt, frustration, resilience and the growing suspicion that nobody was looking in the first place. The script is built from real rejection lines sent to ethnic minority candidates, giving an anonymous and automated language back to the people receiving it.
Starring Ebenezer Gyau and produced by new—land, the film sits at the centre of Reject the Rejections, a campaign by People Like Us, created in partnership with independent creative agency Worth Your While. It responds to the increasing role of automated systems in recruitment and, more specifically, to the lack of transparency around how they make decisions.
The film makes this largely invisible process physical. Its entire world is contained inside an anonymous, windowless waiting room. The setting has the logic of an office but none of its purpose. People wait to be assessed without knowing who, or what, is assessing them.
That uncertainty shapes the film’s visual and sonic language. Corporate phrases are repeated until their politeness begins to feel mechanical; stamps, footsteps and falling paper become part of the rhythm beneath the monologue. The mirror turns observation back onto the person being observed. By the final reveal, one rejected candidate becomes part of a larger room of people waiting for the same answer. What begins as an individual experience gradually exposes a system designed to operate at scale.
DEAR [NAME] is less interested in explaining automation than in showing what it feels like to encounter it from the other side. The following conversation with the film’s director and co-writer, Amara Abbas, looks behind its construction — from the waiting room and two-way glass to the use of sound, 35mm film and the decision to turn the language of rejection into something that can finally answer back.
Gaia V. Marraffa: From the modular chairs to the wall-mounted phone, the waiting room has the unsettling quality of a Kafkaesque non-place. How did you use the physical space to heighten that sense of alienation?
Amara Abbas: Very Kafka. A waiting room is already a kind of transient non-space, so setting the film there gave us a strong foundation to build from. With the set design we stripped away anything that could root you in a specific place or time. The wall-mounted phone we recognize as a mode of communication but in the film we don’t see any dialogue or conversation so for me it almost feels one-way, like the mirror. The doorway looks like it leads to another hallway and gives this illusion its one room in a larger maze-like space. The room itself doesn’t have a ton of personality or context and I think it creates the sort of disorienting feeling that could drive you crazy, especially because there are no windows. You would probably start to wonder how long you’ve been there. I think the mirror also does a lot of work to create the feeling of being watched. And you are physically with others but alone. So combined all these elements created a sense of psychological isolation.
GVM: The “REJECTED” stamp, the footsteps, the sound of paper hitting the floor — the rhythms of office life gradually become part of the film’s musical language. What led you to turn these everyday sounds into the beat beneath the monologue?
AA: I think sound is such a special tool for film, sometimes more effective than image. I love the idea of sound design and music existing as one organism, where you don’t necessarily realize when one ends and the other begins. Here it felt like they needed to be of the same code/speak the same language.
The most important element in this film is actually the words. They are the soul of the film and carry the piece. So I felt the sounds needed to punctuate and support that. Underneath the monologue, the everyday monotonous sounds became a way to add brutality. The stamp sound specifically is like a kind of drum or pulse, something that was brutal and unmistakable. All of these everyday sounds building to me are like the feeling of death by a thousand paper cuts. I think that’s the feeling of constant rejection too, it’s not usually one dramatic blow, but something that accumulates and wears you down in a way. On some instinctual level those sounds become a vessel for that feeling.
GVM: The one-way glass introduces ideas of invisibility, surveillance and a divided sense of self. What does the mirror — and the act of seeing without being seen — represent for you within the film?
AA: There’s a line that captures this feeling better than I can express it, where S.E. Hinton wrote, “…they make me think of a two-way mirror. Like you could feel somebody on the other side watching you, but the only reflections you saw were your own.” That really resonated with me – it’s something that operates more subconsciously. In the film when our main character looks through the glass, all he sees is his own reflection. So in a way I think he sees himself as the problem. Constant rejection does that, it has this way of turning inward, you start questioning if it’s you, if you’re not enough, if you should just work harder. There’s an internalization that happens and it can feel very personal, even though it’s structural by design. In that way, I think it creates a false sense of self and a false sense of truth where what you’re seeing isn’t necessarily reality.
With the element of surveillance the mirror introduces, I wanted it to express a panopticon-like quality that exists within modern office culture and in the hiring process, like being watched by an unknown authority. It’s not so dissimilar to prisons or interrogation rooms, that sort of power imbalance. But here I’m more interested in the human and psychological aspect of the character and how these structures might affect someone over time. What’s the aftermath of what these systems do to someone, what’s their interior and how do they process and deal with that?
GVM: There is a striking moment when the crowd of candidates waiting in the shadows is finally revealed, exposing a version of diversity that exists more as corporate image than genuine inclusion. How did you approach translating that contradiction into the film’s visual language?
AA: It’s funny, I think it actually just happened quite organically. With the very last shot we originally just wanted to make sure we had an image of everyone waiting. Bored or tired, like they’d been there a while, but the positions of each of them, their looks and expressions had an iconography to it that reminded of something like The Breakfast Club. Somehow rebellious in spirit. On the surface because they are all people of color I think it reads like diversity as aesthetic, or kind of like something you’d see on a hiring page. But spending time and sitting in that moment after the characters journey, after we’ve visibly seen these people reduced to a box and to never be chosen creates another emotion. You feel and take in each individual life and hopefully it lets you get past the superficial and to something deeper. I think the moment of him walking back to his seat to the final shot gives us space and time to take in each person in the room and remind us he is just one of many.
GVM: Your work moves between large-scale productions and films with a more explicitly social and political urgency. Where does DEAR [NAME] sit within the evolution of your practice and your visual language as a filmmaker?
AA: I think those choices come more from feeling and instinct or whatever is speaking to me. They are all different facets of what I’m interested in and resonate with. The subject matter I work on often does affect people from my world in one way or another, which is likely why I’m drawn to it and what I want to see more of on screen. I guess you could say my existence is social/political because of my name and where I’m from so even when a project isn’t explicitly about that, the perspective comes with me just from how I experience the world. DEAR [NAME] is very special in terms of personal connection to the material and its disruptive honesty. Everyone who worked on the film also felt that same connection and understood the material demanded to be handled with great care and urgency, as it should be told.
With my visual language, I want to keep challenging myself and keep evolving as an artist. These days, the more I learn about photography and cinema, the more precise and simple I actually want to be. I think restraint often lets emotions come through more clearly. You’re able to just observe and absorb more, it’s like a meditation. I really love that. Shooting on 35mm for this project specifically, I wanted to bring precision into the worldbuilding, the choice of compositions, and just stay close to the character, letting his true emotions lead everything. Overall it gave the film a more formal quality which I’ve been really interested to explore more of, and I’m excited to see where it takes me next.
GVM: You’ve described DEAR [NAME] as a film interested in saying the quiet part out loud. At a time when social divisions feel increasingly visible, what role do you think cinema can play in confronting them and perhaps in breaking some of those barriers down?
AA: With this film specifically the nature of the monologue actually is saying the quiet part out loud. It’s pretty unapologetic and direct. With the kind of change that People Like Us are trying to create, it felt very necessary to be a bit more radical in some way and use the spoken word format to begin al dialogue, where you fully experience what is in this character’s heart and mind so brazenly.
I think cinema itself is its own language, one that is universal. Anyone from anywhere can feel something from it. That’s its gift. It also allows us to spend time with someone. And if you spend enough time with someone, you can relate to them, understand them, even fall in love with them, in a way you might not typically be able to in reality. It’s quite intimate, giving you access to cultures and people from a world entirely different from your own. To me that intimacy is what makes cinema so special. The world does feel increasingly polarizing, many people are quite firm in their beliefs before encountering another perspective, and I mean this on everything – from the smallest things to the big, important things. But if a film can get someone to sit with a person, for 5 minutes or for 90, I wonder if it can disarm some of that defensiveness and invite more curiosity and connection. It opens up another truth or way of seeing, and hopefully from there inspires conversation.