An urgent meeting between the boss of a pharmaceutical company and one of his upstart young employees is called in order to discuss a troubling rumor about a new drug.

‘Side Effected’ is an unusually simple film cinematically speaking, taking place only in one meeting room, but the content brought through and the way it was presented turns this simple short into an enigmatic and unapologetic display of pharmaceutical corruption.

We wanted to examine what is profit oriented and what is customer oriented and the way the line between the two is often blurred. While we didn’t know a lot about pharmaceutical corruption when we began working on the film, we did quite a bit of research and realized we didn’t want to downplay the seriousness of the topic.

The mundane setting and lone shooting location made it possible for the film to be shot in one day and under 1500$. They also decided to save on music to focus more on the content, grabbing bits and pieces from other ressources.

We choose to avoid kitschey apologetic music and goofy sound effects. We actually stole a lot from the unapologetic, black comedy found in Romanian New Wave Films like Police, Adjective and Aurora.

Both protagonists played an immaculate role in the fierce meeting which bonified the entire outcome of the film.

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Take a look at Lev Pakman’s next project: For The Record