Small Fortunes

Anne Marie Boidock was stuck. Despite having just made a major life transition, relocating from the East Coast to Los Angeles to start her career in Hollywood, the recent film school graduate found herself in a loop. She couldn’t shake the hope that a failed romance—her first in LA—might just still find a way to succeed. “I was still constructing my life to be available in case that person walked back through the door,” she says. “I look back on it now and I'm like, I could have saved three years of my life.”

Boidock is fascinated by the idea of being stuck—the reasons we get lodged, the coping mechanisms we rely upon, and the moment we finally move forward. “Sometimes we kind of build a mausoleum to either a moment in time or a past relationship we thought was going to turn into something,” she says.

She explores this idea in her new short film The Connoisseur, which premieres on April 13th at the Allentown Film Festival. The film, which Boidock wrote and directed, follows John, played with amusing, hangdog earnestness by PJ Sosko, a fifty-something fortune cookie enthusiast (to put it mildly) stuck in his own obsessive loop, looking for answers at the center of his beloved post-meal treats

The window viewers get into John’s ‘mausoleum’ is bleak. He spends his nights scouring his city for new Chinese restaurants in hopes that his next meal might finally yield the fortune—and answer (the question is intentionally left ambiguous until the film’s climax)—he so badly needs. In an extended, dizzying sequence we’re given a glimpse of the depth of his obsession: “Any day above ground is a good day” reads one fortune, “While big tree falls hard, biggest tree doesn’t fall at all” another. His bed is littered with discarded cookie shards. His enshrined ‘fortune of the week’ reads “When a woman holds the door open for you, don’t grab the door, just say ‘Thank you.’ It’s not the dark ages.” He nostalgically peruses a scrapbook of his favorites the way one pours over a childhood photo album.

In Boidock’s film, fortune cookies feel like a perfect metaphor for getting stuck, and our tendency to manufacture signs that can keep us in our rut. Like a rhetorical rorschach test, they’re ultimately less about the content and more about the consumer, suitably vague to affirm any individual’s hopes or fears (why yes, a funny coincidence DID make my day; I DO have a dubious friend who is an enemy in disguise; I HAVE always had a good feeling about the number 432).

“I'm very much intrigued by considering whether or not people look for meaning for it in the wrong place—or maybe wrong is a judgement, but in a place they're unlikely to get it,” says Boidock. This is a phenomenon that she believes is increasingly common in the modern age. “That's the thing with social media. People fire it up looking for meaning, but it's like, what are you actually looking for?”

In that sense, her film seems to offer an analogue solution for our digital age. In the midst of his spiral, IRL human interactions offer John some respite. First, in the form of his charming delivery man (John dumps the food, eager for the fortune). Much more than any fortune, these moments offer reassurance that John still has the capacity for human connection, and hope that he might just be ok. “You paint the world the way you want it to be as a filmmaker, and the world the way I want it to be is one where these small interactions can be delightful and wonderful,” says Boidock.

Ultimately, it’s another human interaction that gives John the momentum he needs to break free from his cycle. In the film’s climax, John suits up and ventures out of his crumb-filled condo to try a new restaurant in-person. After inconsequential rounds of manhattans and food that disappear as quickly as they arrive, John’s fortune is finally brought with his check. What he reads shocks him. This particular fortune cuts through the aphoristic bullshit and touches a nerve that he (and by now, the viewer) knows to be true.

John demands to speak to the restaurant’s manager. In the kitchen, he stumbles across the fortune’s scribe, a precocious teen (a winning half-sneering, half-wise beyond her years Sarah Bock) with what John assumes to be a mystical window into his psyche. Their interaction lays bare his insecurities, offering him the gift of an outsider’s take on his loop. It’s this perspective that finally allows him to get unstuck. And crucially, it wasn’t anything supernatural that allowed her to perceive it, just a preternatural gift for observation. The kind that requires taking the time to really observe the world around you, and to take your head out of your phone, or your ass (or your pile of fortunes). The kind that’s increasingly rare in today’s world.

“She is a voyeur of life, a master observer, and that is so much more important than any kind of mysticism. But it is such a lost art right now,” says Boidock. “We're in this era where everyone, partially because of social media, but partially because of so many other things, where everyone's searching for meaning in their life.”

This is where fortune cookies again feel relevant. Yes, they’re generically engineered for mass appeal. But at the same time, there’s something affirming about their ambiguity. In Boidock’s film, there seems to be an acknowledgement that a prerequisite for getting unstuck is one’s own readiness for change. And once you are, sometimes all it takes is the perfectly timed piece of advice—from a friend or loved one, a therapist, a stranger, or yes, even a catch-phrase inside a cookie, to dislodge oneself. When you’re open, meaning is where you make it.

“You go on a date and you're like, you better be wonderful, and the other person's thinking the same thing. And it's like, can anything organic grow when you're scoring something, whether it’s a person or your life?” says Boidock. “Some of the most meaningful moments from my life were when I was traveling to another country, I missed my train, I'm walking 20 blocks in the pouring rain, and somebody in a coffee shop let me in to use the charger and gave me a warm cup to drink. I love these unconventional moments and jolts that can knock off your socks and make you rethink something.”

John’s fate, and the human interaction that helps him move forward, seems to be at least in part inspired by the thing that got Boidock out of her own loop. “There's nothing like a vent session with some friends, you know,” she says. “Good friendships have really helped me through those moments.”

That ability to offer or shift perspectives is ultimately why Boidock got into filmmaking in the first place. “I think our ability to affect change and incite conversation comes in the form of entertainment now more than it ever has. Or it’s providing an escape from something that someone's going through. It has the power and meaning to better a person’s day or week,” she says. “For this film it was about just leaving people with a delighted, weird feeling of, ‘Man, you just don't know what's around the corner in life.’ And if you can try to be a little bit more of an observer of your own life, maybe you won't miss some of the weird, wonderful things that might come to you.”

Upcoming Film Screenings:

The Connoisseur premieres at the Allentown Film Festival on Sunday April 13, 2025 in the Comedy Shorts block. More info and tickets here.

April 24, 2025 at the Massachusetts Independent Film Festival.

The Connoisseur is an Official Selection at the following film festivals:

Tulsa Underground Film Festival

Buenos Aires International Film Festival

East Village New York Film Festival

Cornershop Film Festival

Swedish International Film Festival