Director Jane Schoenbrun on the Extremely Online, Gender Dysphoric Coming-of-Age Journey in ‘We’re All Going to the World’s Fair’

variety.com:

Wilson Chapman editorIn its first scene, “We’re All Going To the World’s Fair” seems to be setting up a standard found footage horror film: a girl named Casey (Anna Cobb) opens her laptop and records a YouTube video announcing she will participate in a strange online trend, “The World’s Fair Challenge,” one that has supposedly has caused other people to experience disturbing changes to their bodies.

But when Casey is contacted by a much older man, going by the username JLB (Michael Rogers), the film reveals itself to be something much stranger and far more tender: a coming-of-age story about being lonely and lost, and the vulnerability of sending a piece of yourself into the online void hoping someone will respond. “We’re All Going To the World’s Fair” is directed by Jane Schoenbrun, a trans and non-binary filmmaker and curator who wrote the film during a dark period in their life, before they began physically transitioning, while they reflecting on their experiences on the internet as a young queer kid in the early 2000s.

At the time, Schoenbrun spent most of their online life on horror film forums and writing “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “X-Files” fanfiction.

After revisiting these memories, Schoenbrun put pen to paper, and tried to capture their own unique, queer understanding of what it means to be online.“A lot of work that has been made about the internet tends to be very maximalist,” Schoenburn says. “This idea of the internet as this insane space where codes, tabs, algorithms are flying at you at the speed of light.