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An actress, Rose, stands at a precipice. It is a classic setup. A career-defining role hangs in the balance, contingent on the absurd demand that she shed pounds she does not possess. Simultaneously, her body stages a quiet, biological coup: a pregnancy she was assured by medicine and trauma was an impossibility.

The world conspires to close in. Her boyfriend, Travis, a man of breathtaking unseriousness, and his mother, Martha—a chilling Sheryl Lee, whose ownership of her son’s progeny is nothing short of feudal—present a united front of external control.

They have plans for her, for the child. Rose has other ideas. Her flight from their suffocating benevolence is not toward freedom, but toward a clinical solution in a remote town. She checks into The Crown Inn in Idyllwild, seeking a sterile anonymity. She finds something else entirely. The place is not a refuge; it is a crucible.

Premiering at this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival, “I Live Here Now” is a hellish, fever-dream-like trip. In her feature debut, writer-director Julie Pacino has chosen to explore the labyrinths of human psychology and memories. Comparisons with David Lynch’s works, specifically “Inland Empire,” are inevitable. Admittedly, “I Live Here Now” pulls its punches and remains a little more rooted to ‘reality’ than what “Inland Empire” did. Whether that is for the good or the bad, it depends entirely on whether you find Lynch frustratingly impenetrable or bizarrely brilliant. I tend to veer towards the latter while appreciating the frustration mentioned in the former. So, as someone who does not mind an occasional nightmare, “I Live Here Now” just about works for me.

Like “Inland Empire,” “I Live Here Now” centers around an actress and her bid to play a role. Rose (Lucy Fry) is an aspiring actress who...

Rose (Lucy Fry) has always known she cannot have children. The tragic result of a childhood surgery whose trauma embedded itself in her mind as a nightmare, this truth became a major part of her identity. A crucial piece to the puzzle that was her so-called brokenness. This is why she can’t wrap her head around the news when the doctor tells her she’s pregnant. It’s not just the irony that this discovery comes as a result of being ordered to lose three pounds for a potential acting role, but the horrible timing of finally catching a big career break when the opportunity to start a family miraculously manifests. Rose must escape the chaos. She must figure out what she wants. Who she is. Who she can still become.

The debut feature from Julie Pacino, I Live Here Now embraces an unsettling humor from the beginning. There’s the noted,...

Lucy Fry’s Rose, a woman haunted by trauma, ends up checking herself into an inn where reality seems to unravel, blurring the lines between past and present, and waking life and dreams. That’s the set-up for I Live Here Now, writer-director Julie Pacino’s feature directorial debut, which world premieres on Thursday at the Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal before screening at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland in the out-of-competition lineup and then traveling to the Edinburgh International Film Festival for its Midnight Madness program.

“The film pulses with competing anxieties: the pursuit of perfection, the weight of generational trauma, and the invisible fist of capitalism tightening its grip around the necks of its characters,” the Fantasia synopsis reads. “Pacino plunges us into a vibrant and nightmarish psychodrama that reverberates with echoes of David Lynch, Dario Argento and the Coen brothers.”

Shot on 35 millimeter film, with...

You may have already seen her reality show Yolanthe on Netflix, but on Saturday evening at the London Hotel in West Hollywood, Yolanthe Cabau called for attention to the work of Free a Girl, the organization she founded to rescue young girls being sex trafficked around the world.

So far, since its 2008 launch, Free a Girl has rescued 8500 children from sex trafficking and helped lock up 2300 of the perpetrators.

“I, myself, grew up in a unsafe household,” Cabau said. “My father was a drug addict, and my mom and me and my siblings, we had to flee the country because it was very dangerous. So we went from Spain to Holland, and as a child growing up in that unsafe environment, I always knew that one day, I wanted to do something for those children that don’t have a voice or people don’t see them, and they’re so vulnerable.