2024 Richmond International Film Festival
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WELCOME TO THE SHOW
1:35:48 | United States | 2020
Narrative Feature
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Feature
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Thriller
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Opening Night
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An invitation to a mysterious theatre piece, “Welcome to the Show,” sends four best friends down a mind-bending rabbit hole of mistrust and madness as they try to figure out who are the actors, who is the audience, who is doing this to them, and why.


Dorie Barton made her debut as writer-director with the feature film "Girl Flu." which premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival in 2016 and went on to become a festival hit, screening at over 30 festivals worldwide, garnering many awards including the Audience Award in the New Director category at the Nashville Film Festival.


Barton has just completed her second feature, "Welcome to the Show," which she wrote specifically for her acting students at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she earned her MFA in Theatre (2020) and teaches Acting for the Camera. "Welcome to the Show," was filmed entirely on location in Richmond, Virginia.


As an actor, Barton has been seen in countless television shows from daytime drama to multi-cam sitcoms, major motion pictures and indie favorites. Barton has performed onstage for much of her life as an award-winning actor, and remains a proud member of the Evidence Room Theater Company in Los Angeles.



Director Statement

You are cordially invited to The Show. What is The Show? This is the central question of the film itself, and drives every moment of our journey. Four best friends on a lark answer the invitation to attend the mysterious event, and are thrust into an immersive experience they weren’t expecting. Morality gets twisted, friendships get tested, and the only thing holding them together is the fractured belief that there must be some kind of logic to the madness.


Our mind-bending film does to its audience what The Show does to its audience. The demise of our four heroes’ sense of security and meaning is echoed all around us. We’re all disoriented and deprived. We began production in a time of innocence and landed in a time of great uncertainty and fear. This film has come to represent that fall from innocence, not just for four boys becoming men on their way home from The Show, but on the global scale of all of us becoming beings of insecurity and isolation. How are we going to escape? Will life ever be the same again?

The journey of making this film has been an incredible growth for me as an artist and person, and I’m deeply grateful to everyone on our small but extremely talented and generous team. I’ve had to face a lot of demons in the making of this, learning how to navigate nothingness to put myself in the shoes of those who must do the same. I’m fortunate to have had this film to pour myself into. By continuing to make art, we make meaning even when we suspect there is none.


The interpretation of the film is up to you. Many truths are possible. I hope, in what would be the greatest compliment of all, that some people are inspired to watch our film more than once, just to see if maybe the true meaning of The Show is that now it’s your turn to become The Show.

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  • Year:
    2020
  • Runtime:
    1:35:48
  • Language:
    English
  • Country:
    United States
  • Director:
    Dorie Barton
  • Screenwriter:
    Dorie Barton
  • Producer:
    Dorie Barton, S.C.V. Taylor