A hit on the independent festival circuit, Chaser won Best Series at both the Birmingham Film & TV Festival and Star International Film Festival in 2024, and received nominations for Best Series, as well as nominations for Best Actor (Russ Russo), Best Supporting Actor (Daniel de Weldon), and Best Actress (Gia Bay) at Breaking TV Festival 2023 in London. Chaser was a finalist at the Stockholm Film & Television Festival and a semi-finalist at Blow-Up International Arthouse Film Festival.
Chaser is an eight-episode sci-fi drama following the life of struggling film editor Eddi Sebastian (Russ Russo). Frustrated with his life and work, Eddi experiences a life-changing event as he discovers a mysterious software that lets him cut and edit his life from the past 24 hours. Each half-hour episode sees Eddi drawn further and further into a new, mysterious world – only partly of his own creation – and chronicles the increasingly dark, compounding consequences of his editing decisions.
This erudite show is part of a wider trend in entertainment towards cerebral science fiction, be it the new Netflix series 3 Body Problem, Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part 2 or Severance or Foundation on Apple – sci-fi that’s less about epic space battles and more about intellect, is very much de rigueur in 2024. This series asks us to consider the ethics of changing the past, our role in manipulating the choices of others, and the complexities of the butterfly effect, where one small change can unleash devastating effects.
Fans of Russo will remember him from his previous roles in Ryan Phillippe’s directorial debut, Catch Hell, the acclaimed short Victim No. Six, NBC’s Revolution, and feature film An Act of War for which he won Best Actor at the New York-based Take Two Film Festival. Alongside Russo, Chaser features Daniel de Weldon, star of the critically acclaimed horror film Anonymous 616, and Gia Bay, who can be seen on Season 5 of What We Do In The Shadows and as Chozanne Lopez on Diggstown.
The series is written and directed by Daniel Roemer, whose previous work includes the feature film Gray, which received a special screening by Sony Pictures. His short, The Select Fit, on which the series Chaser is loosely based, was distributed by Lionsgate and was a top 20 finalist in Project Greenlight, handpicked from over 12,000 entries by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, as well as winning multiple other awards. Chaser was inspired by Roemer’s love of Donnie Darko, the series Black Mirror, and the work of Darren Aronofsky and Stanley Kubrick.
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