AI and Faith: Student’s Film Premieres at SBIFF
Westmont senior Ashley Clark, an English and theater arts double major from Henderson, Nevada, participated in the Santa Barbara International Film Festival’s competitive five-month filmmaking program. During that time, she wrote a screenplay, “Deus Ex Machina.” The festival paired her with UC Santa Barbara international student Can Basoglu, who directed the short film that premieres during the festival Saturday, Feb. 14, at 2 p.m. at Santa Barbara’s historic Arlington Theatre.
Clark had heard about SBIFF’s 10-10-10 screenwriting/filmmaking mentorship program and finally took the plunge this year despite a busy schedule of coursework and theater rehearsals.
“It’s a big leap to put yourself and your creative work out there to be perceived and judged,” she says. “Also, I didn’t feel prepared. Only after three years of working with my peers and professors and growing as an artist and writer was I finally able to look inward and think, ‘Okay, I’m ready to take this risk now.’”
In the film, a group of nuns realize one of their sisters in the convent has been hiding an orphaned, artificially intelligent humanoid child in their church, and they struggle to discern what to do about it. “They wrestle with AI and its relationship to religion in a variety of ways, from debating whether discipline or forgiveness is more Christlike in their situation to contemplating automaton theory and what it means to be alive,” Clark says.
“Deus Ex Machina” means “God in the Machine.” The phrase from Greek theater refers to a plot device that writes a character out of an otherwise impassable obstacle. Typically, it involved actors playing gods who descended onstage to grant the hero a miracle and solve the conflict.
“For me, the film’s title refers to the characters’ struggle with finding Christ and Christlike behavior in the unimaginable moral and political dilemma they’ve stumbled upon,” she says.
She credits the cast and Basoglu for their dedication and kindness during the challenging process of filmmaking. “Can is a superstar. I was nervous that my script about Catholicism and AI with an all-female cast would be daunting to a director unfamiliar with the themes,” she says. “Early on in the process, he was candid about never having set foot in a church. Despite that, he’s shown nothing but the utmost respect and enthusiasm for the script and the questions it asks. He was able to gather a solid cast and crew who were committed to the work and treated the story with the same amount of sincerity.”
At Westmont, Clark serves as editor-in-chief of the Phoenix, a literary magazine. For the past two years, she worked on the Citadel, the college’s yearbook, as a copywriter. She continues to participate with the theater department’s Fringe Festival, even serving as production manager last year. She was the dramaturg for “Antigonick” in the fall and oversaw lighting for the show. She has also worked in hair and makeup and costume design for previous shows.
“I love being diversely involved in creative projects with my friends, and Westmont theater is a rare place that allows me to do all that without adhering to a strict concentration or discipline,” she says. “I've been trained to be a well-rounded artist, keenly aware of all the cogs in the machine that make up a grand project, and I hope it shows.”
Clark loves being a full-time student and hopes to pursue an MFA in playwriting or creative writing after graduating from Westmont. With a goal of being hired as a professional writer, she’ll continue to heed the advice she received on a fanfiction website. “An anonymous comment left on one of my short stories said, ‘I hope you never lose your spark in writing’” she says. “That’s a hope of mine, too. Perhaps the most important one.”