CAFÉ FALLIBLE

The second feature film in Scenes from Parallel Lives

In an open society quietly undermined from within, two performers running the wrong kind of café attract the wrong kind of attention.

Synopsis

Cat and Fae run Café Fallible, a cultural sanctuary in a city where open inquiry is under quiet pressure. They spend their days happily staging satirical and philosophical performances, until Fae starts transcribing messages from a source she can’t identify, in a code she can’t read. A masked messenger carries her pages away and returns with incomplete instructions. Then a box of lo-fi electronics appears for the duo to assemble.

Jack and Jill answer to the same cause. Jill is committed. Jack, divided.

Colin is watching for someone else, and chasing something of his own.

No one watching Café Fallible can say exactly what it’s building. Only that it’s dangerous enough to want destroyed.

Project Status

• Fine cut available for screening
• Premiere Status: World premiere available. Not yet publicly screened

Visual & Stylistic Approach

• Fixed-camera tableaux
• Long passages without dialogue
• Cabaret performance as philosophical engine
• Deliberate technological anachronism: paper, wired communication, public telephones
• Science fiction displaced largely off-screen

Themes

• Consciousness and legitimacy
• The ethics of fallibility versus certainty
• Creativity, performance and social control
• Signals emerging from beyond authorised systems

Key Characters

Cat & Fae (Lena Sakalla, Lia Ikkos)
Performers using satire, music and staged dialogue to maintain a fragile cultural sanctuary.

Colin (Ricard Serra)
A conflicted infiltrator drawn into a world he was meant only to observe.

Jack & Jill (Samuel Allan, Alessia Yoko Fontana)
Political believers whose shared ideology fractures in opposite directions.

CREDITS

• Director / Writer / Composer / Editor Robert Iolini
• Director of Photography Santiago Villar Becker
• Producers Robert Iolini & Emi Morita

SPECIFICATIONS

• Project Type: Feature
• Genres: Drama, Speculative, Mystery
• Runtime: 66 minutes
• Completion Date: 2026–27
• Country of Origin: Australia
• Country of Filming: Spain
• Language: English
• Shooting Format: Digital
• Aspect Ratio: 16.9
• Film Colour: Colour
• First-time Filmmaker: No
• Student Project: No