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"Ring Me Back" is a personal documentary that follows Xavi, a first-year PhD chemistry student at UC Santa Barbara, as he navigates the pressures of academic life alongside an undercurrent of anxiety that shapes his daily routine. The film opens with a recurring phone call from an unidentified voice, used as a structuring device that only later reveals itself to be his twin sister — the filmmaker. Working observationally and in close-up, the film renders Xavi's anxiety through embodied gesture and repetition (stress-ball squeezing, lip-biting, recurring sounds like ticking clocks and car indicators) rather than explanation, building tension until it breaks open in a rage-room sequence where Xavi unexpectedly turns the camera back on the filmmaker himself — collapsing the distance between subject and observer. Drawing on the reflective, participant-observer tradition of filmmakers like Jean Rouch and Agnès Varda, the film ultimately reframes its earlier scenes through the lens of familial intimacy, asking what it means to witness someone you're closest to without ever fully explaining what you see.

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