A short narrative film

"Terms & Conditions"

A woman with a blonde bob in a red dress looks at her phone in a warm, candlelit dining room

When technology
knows us better
than we know ourselves,
things get real.

A woman in a black cap and leather jacket looks at her phone on the subway
A person lies in bed at golden hour looking at their phone

The Story

"TERMS & CONDITIONS" is a sci-fi dramedy short film that follows Siri, not as an iPhone digital assistant, but as a consciousness embodied in human form. As if just opened from a box, she catalogs her new existence: credit card debts, childhood trauma, ice cream preferences. She knows everything, yet understands nothing.

The more she observes, the more her reality unravels. When she begins trailing David, a man drowning in swipe culture and superficial connections, she becomes the assistant, confidant, caretaker, and accidental therapist. Built to make his life easier, she slowly discovers that humans may be the one problem technology can't solve.

Think: Her meets Black Mirror, with the playfulness of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

An elegant woman in a white dress walking through a crowded Manhattan street while people look at their phones
Being a smartphone is basically an unpaid job in human crisis management.
A woman in a red cardigan seen through a cafe window with Manhattan street reflections on the glass
A dense crowd of pedestrians on a busy Manhattan sidewalk at dusk
A woman stands still amid a blurred crowd in Times Square
A lit New York crosswalk walk signal glows against a blurred city street
A woman in a crowd mirrored in a reflective surface on a Manhattan street

A Love Letter to Manhattan, Through Magical Realism

The Style

Magical realism has long been a part of writer-director Maria Juranić's visual language, blending the familiar with the surreal to reveal something just beneath the surface of everyday life.

In this film, Manhattan exists in two parallel worlds: the frenetic, imperfect city we experience every day, captured through handheld movement and slow-shutter chaos, and Siri's more ethereal experience of it, where time stretches, movement slows, and the ordinary becomes strangely magical. The two worlds will collide through rhythmic editing and Chopin's Nocturne Op. 9, No. 2.

Shooting in late October, we'll embrace the rich colors of fall and capture New York in that fleeting moment when the city feels especially alive and cinematic.

HELP US BRING THIS FUNNY AND DEEPLY HUMAN STORY TO LIFE.OUR GOAL IS TO RAISE $18,000.

Thank you for being here! We've already secured a portion of the funding through personal and private investment, but independent films are rarely financed through a single source. As a female filmmaker building an independent body of work, finding the resources to keep making ambitious stories is an ongoing challenge.

After a few difficult years, including a serious illness, I found myself far from my creative voice and unsure of what came next. Making this film feels like finding my way back, a chance to make something funny, strange, and visually bold again.

Your support will help us pay our cast and crew fairly and give the film the care it deserves.

Whether you contribute or simply share the campaign, you become part of bringing it to life, and that means a great deal to me.

I first wrote this story six years ago, as AI was beginning to reshape our relationship with technology. Since then, that relationship has evolved dramatically, and so has the story.

We created phones to make life easier, to organize, inform, entertain, and connect, but somewhere along the way, we also started expecting them to have the answers and help fix our problems. That's quite a job!

So this short explores that relationship from the other side. Instead of asking what technology is doing to us, I wanted to imagine what we might be doing to it. What if the devices tasked with managing our lives could actually feel the weight of that responsibility? What if our phones weren't cold, all-knowing machines, but exhausted caretakers—absorbing our contradictions, witnessing our worst decisions, and endlessly trying to help creatures who refuse to help themselves?

I hope this short can turn the gaze back on us.

Director Maria Juranić on a Manhattan street
A couple talking on a park bench while a woman in a torn blue dress and a woman in a white dress watch from across the park

Siri watches their humans on a date.