Details
Union:
Union or Non union
Area of media:
Short Film
Network:
Paid?:
No
Rates:
Unpaid as per agreement between CFC & ACTRA.
Deadline:
Sept 4, 2025
Shooting locations:
GTA
Cities for response:
Toronto
Roles
| Role type | Role | Gender & Age range |
| Lead | SELAM HAGOS | Female 30 - 39 Years old |
Description Female, 30s, Eritrean. Performer must be partially fluent in Tigrinya. Selam is the eldest daughter of Eritrean refugees, the firstborn in a new country, raised between worlds. From an early age, she was tasked with adult responsibilities like translating for her parents, managing family logistics, parenting her younger siblings, and becoming the family’s symbol of success. She is the first to go to university, the first to achieve “stability,” and the one on whom the family’s hopes quietly rest but that responsibility came at a price. As the stoic, high-achiever, Selam learned to suppress her needs, compartmentalize her pain, and perform composure. And now, after the sudden death of her youngest sister, Betty, those lifelong repressed emotions have nowhere left to hide. Her grief, unprocessed and long-denied, is beginning to rupture her carefully curated self-image and threaten her fragile mental state. What appears as a haunting may actually be the emotional aftermath of a life spent surviving rather than feeling. Selam represents the emotional cost of being the “model” daughter, the immigrant child who carries generational survival on her back. Her journey is one of internal collapse and a reckoning with identity, grief, and the trauma of never being allowed to feel. Performer must be partially fluent in Tigrinya. | ||
| Role type | Role | Gender & Age range |
| Lead | BINYAM GEBREZGHI | Male 30 - 39 Years old |
Description Male, 30s, Eritrean. Performer must be FULLY fluent in Tigrinya. Binyam is a quiet, haunted Eritrean man shaped by the journey to flee out of one of the world’s most closed-off countries. Born and raised in Eritrea where forced military conscription is indefinite and dissent is silenced, Binyam longed for freedom and illegally fled. His escape led him through a gauntlet of trauma through Sudan, Libya, smugglers, black-market labor, starvation, and boats that didn’t always reach the shore. He’s one of the few who made it to Canada alive. Now, Binyam is a survivor with a fractured sense of self. As a newcomer, he’s watched many of his friends, fellow refugees, take their own lives in a country that promised safety but was met with isolation. In Toronto, where the Eritrean community often celebrates success, upward mobility, and reputation, Binyam feels invisible. He doesn't fit the model of the assimilated newcomer. He doesn’t belong in the living world. Instead, he finds companionship among the dead, cleaning headstones, speaking to graves, and listening for the voices of those who’ve crossed over. Whether it's spiritual, psychological, or both, this connection has become his lifeline. He isn’t crazy, he’s displaced, grieving, and clinging to a reality where he still has purpose. But as his connection to the dead grows stronger, his hold on the living world grows weaker. Binyam is the embodiment of immigrant trauma that doesn’t get healed, a man surviving in the margins of both his culture and his mind. He is a mirror to Selam: where she suppresses grief in favor of survival, Binyam lives in grief because survival cost him everything else. Performer must be FULLY fluent in Tigrinya. | ||
| Role type | Role | Gender & Age range |
| Lead | JOSEPH SEYOUM | Male 30 - 39 Years old |
Description Male, 30s, Eritrean. Joseph is Selam’s husband, her rock, her refuge, the first person who truly made her feel safe. Where Selam’schildhood was survival-focused and burdened with expectation, Joseph’s upbringing was supportive, and less restrictive where he was allowed more freedom. Making his family proud was a goal but not a mandate. He chose that path willingly. This emotional contrast is at the heart of Joseph’s dynamic with Selam. He sees her drowning in grief and refuses to abandon her, but he cannot understand the weight of what she carries, which is years of repression, the trauma of being a parentified child, and the loss of someone she was responsible for. For Joseph, grief is something to be felt and moved through. For Selam, it is a world she’s trapped inside. Joseph has been patient, endlessly so. He supported Selam when Betty lived with them, even when it strained their relationship. He made space for grief. He waited. But now, years later, he’s running out of room to defer his own desires, especially the life they promised to build together. A nursery. A family. A future. He is loving and loyal, but deeply conflicted and unsure if the woman he fell in love with is ever coming back, and unsure how much more he can give without losing himself in her grief. Joseph is the emotional bridge between grief and normalcy, not the enemy, but the limit. He embodies the version of survival that Selam was never afforded. One that is supported, encouraged, and allowed to rest. His struggle is not just with Selam’s loss, but with his own: the loss of a shared future, the loss of a partner, and the possibility that love may not be enough. | ||