Cara (2024) premiered on Sunday, August 25th at Pigeon Shine FrightFest in a sold-out screening. Directed by Hayden Hewitt, a co-founder of the infamous shock site LiveLeak, the 96-minute film is bleak to the point of unease. It is a harrowing exploration of the painful depths of the human experience.

Elle O’Hara portrays Cara, a woman attempting to recover from a history of childhood sexual abuse and the resulting scars left on her psyche. She is a sex worker who streams on a red-room fetish site to a small group of fans. The sexual content in the film weaves from reluctant sex work to abuse in a matter of seconds and it’s enough to make one queasy without veering into full exploitation. Here is a woman who is deeply struggling to function despite her trauma on top of the normal experience of womanhood which is already trodden with its own hardships.