A caustically funny art-world satire and an on-point millennial snapshot – The African Desperate wraps these and more into a delicious debut.

Having graduated from her Master of Fine Arts at an upstate New York university, Palace just wants to go home to Chicago. She’s had enough of her all-white faculty’s microaggressions (including resentment at the fact that she’s already exhibited at the Venice Biennale). She’s had enough of her peers and their shallow, condescending opinions. She definitely doesn’t want to attend the graduation party – but that’s where she ends up as her night takes an increasingly hazy, sometimes surreal turn.

Deliriously sending up the art world, The African Desperate is visual and performance artist Martine Syms’s hilarious debut feature. Fellow artist Diamond Stingily is a deadpan delight as Palace, drifting through an erratic evening of drugs, booze and music, and vexed that her friends project their insecurities and theories onto her as if she were a blank, non-human canvas. Drawing inspiration from 90s rom-coms and her own familiarity with the ‘scene’, Syms combines biting humour and social critique with old-school memes and multimedia, creating a film that is playfully inventive and unique.

“The African Desperate is a trip … Witty, sharp, and right on the mark, this is social commentary for the art world like we’ve never seen it before.” – Vogue