Cinephile № 822 “Searching Eva”

Recommendation: 3/5 Stars, STREAM

Plot: “When in 1996 Grateful Dead songwriter John Perry Barlow announced, “a civilization of the spirit” with cyberspace — “may it be more humane and just than the world your governments have built so far” — F. was four years old. A few years later, the young Italian declared privacy an outdated concept, gave herself the name Eva and put her diary online on her first blog. Over the next few years, she became an Internet star, an underground icon of the blogging world, allowing anyone who wanted to participate in her maturing process. Today Eva is in her early twenties and oscillates between her “real” life as an anarchic vagabond, social marginal figure and “feminist” sex worker and the life of her Internet persona, iconized as the leading figure of the authentic.” -IMDB

Review: For my 15th film of the 2019 AFI Fest, I began with a question. What has social media and, to a greater extent, the internet done to us? To answer this question, “Searching Eva” analyzes the life of Eva. Eva is a young Italian woman who has declared privacy dead and broadcasts very intimate details of her life as she navigates adulthood, life as a sex worker, and a sense of self. As she does, we come to understand the trauma associated with an exposed life that is never settled.