Casting About

The agony of the audition, as depicted in this documentary featuring footage of 350 actresses competing for three roles in a movie. “The acting process is joyously celebrated in CASTING ABOUT, a captivating documentary shot entirely in audition rooms during the search for three thesps for a feature film.” (Richard Kuipers, Variety)

“With its sterile anonymity and forced intimacy, it’s hard not to think of the audition room as an amalgam of job interview, therapy session and confessional. Culled from director Barry J. Hershey’s casting tapes for a film he planned to make, Casting About is a nicely contemplative documentary about actors and their ambivalent relationship with that intimidating space. Footage from 184 actresses fills the movie’s 86 minutes, which is broken down into thematically linked sequences such as personal histories, issues concerning nudity, and monologues. Little is revealed about Hershey’s fiction film — he’s casting for a model, a fashion assistant and a nun — but this only helps support CASTING ABOUT’s underlying supposition that the audition process is, in actuality, a bizarre mating ritual between actor and filmmaker, a testing ground for creative compatibility. Because Hershey needed permission from his actresses to include their tapes, he avoids showing the sort of humiliatingly inept hopefuls that invariably provide comic fodder for reality programs. And although the film can be too precious in its insistence that every actress is special, Hershey and editor Marc Grossman mostly strike the right balance of respectful distance and bewildered curiosity about these largely unknown performers. Those who work in casting could argue that Casting About is just another day at the office, but by not shying away from the mundaneness of auditioning, Hershey’s documentary slowly evolves beyond highfalutin concepts like “the craft of acting” into universal questions about surface beauty, inner depth and the double-edged sword of following a dream. (Tim Grierson, L.A. Weekly)