Hank and Asha

Hank and Asha, winner of the 2013 Slamdance Film Festival Audience Award, is a romance for the millennial set. Just as letters served their purpose in Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner or AOL in You’ve Got Mail, the mode of communication is integral to the film: The titular characters only correspond through video messages.

While there’s no case of mistaken identity or intention in Hank and Asha, it explores the age-old question of finding human connections—only this time in an overly plugged-in world. The film struggles at times with its video plot device (making it feel longer than its 73 minutes), but the captivating leads help buoy the familiar storyline.

Asha (Mahira Kakkar), a film student from India studying in Prague for a year, sees a documentary at a film festival. She sends the filmmaker a video message asking him a few questions about the film. New York-based director Hank (Andrew Pastides) sends her a response, through he’s a little uncomfortable in front of the camera (and even has trouble adjusting his camera at first, a humorous touch).

Hank asks if she’d just like to video chat (which was our question as well), but she sends him scenes filmed around the city of Prague, saying those moments would be lost in a video chat. Hank doesn’t push it further, and so the audience is asked to take a leap of faith (and possibly chalk it up to the time difference between the two). Through a series of video messages—in which they’re never onscreen together—the characters develop a friendship, which progresses into a more nebulous territory.

With a loose framework for a script written by the husband and wife team of James E. Duff, the film’s director, and Julia Morrison, editor, Hank and Asha has a documentary feel to it. Kakkar and Pastides, who are both theater actors trained in improvisation as well as aspiring filmmakers, were relied upon to collaborate on the dialogue (or in this case, monologues) and even hold the camera for certain shots.