Debut feature coming spring 2024


rape play by
gabriella mykal

Rape Play is an experimental documentary exploring fanfiction writing amongst teenage girls online and the learned narrativization of sexual experiences. Through interviews, lyrical essays, and fantastical reenactment, it touches on internet history, sexual assault discourse, and the magical cultural production happening in the bedrooms of teenage girls worldwide every day. The title of the film is derived from the tag put on fanfiction to designate depictions of role-played non-consensual encounters. The film becomes a kind of memoir as I interrogate my own experiences of sexual violence and how reading these fictions at such a young age informed and continues to inform my relationship to sex, violence, and community.

2023 Collection Award Recipient for the Archive of Documentary Arts at Duke University’s David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library

A film about imagination, recollection, and girls talking.


the filmmaker

Gabriella Mykal is a West Indian American visual artist and filmmaker. Through film, video installation, writing, and sculpture, her work treats personal trauma as an access point to humor and social hyperreality. She combines narrative and experimental techniques to explore radical vulnerability, femme friendship, romance, and sexual dysfunction as grounds for political discourse. Found footage and unreliable narrators craft a vibrant, Cyberfeminist sensibility.