Rap World

The year is 2009, suburban Pennsylvania. Three friends decide to make an album and plan to finish it in one night. They carry a camera too; they are shooting a documentary, because they will need this footage once they are famous. The night goes on and nothing keeps to the plan: no studio, no equipment, one of them permanently on the phone, a house party to go to, a girlfriend problem, and the recording never starts. By morning there is still no album. The camera does not switch off. Conner O'Malley and Danny Scharar write and direct. O'Malley, Jack Bensinger and Eric Rahill are in the cast. It was shot on a DV camcorder of the period; the picture quality is deliberately poor and looks as if it were shot in 2009. The shoot was spread over three years and the crew kept extremely small. Its world premiere was in April 2024 as the closing film of the Los Angeles Festival of Movies. It was not given to a distributor; after a screening tour it was published free on O'Malley's YouTube channel. The humour it builds is not contempt; the camera mocks these three but does not abandon them. Its limit is form; the cutting is deliberately loose, scenes run long and some sections come apart. Who it is for: viewers who like found footage comedy and low budget American humour. Who it is not for: the image quality is bad on purpose, the pace slow, and there is almost no plot.