Julian Castronovo is 27 years old. He’s 6’1” and 155 pounds. This is the only biographical information you’ll find about him on his website, and it’s the same way he’s introduced to the audience in his debut feature, titled: Debut, or, Objects of the Field of Debris as Currently Catalogued. Castronovo describes it as an “inverse auto-fiction” — forging a mystery that has consumed his life. The detective story begins after a day of heavy drinking, when he finds a letter delivered to his apartment addressed to a previous tenant, Fawn. He discovers several other objects hidden in the walls by this enigma, prompting his investigation. “Who lived here?” Fawn was an art forger. Or, at least, that’s what Castronovo initially suspects. More importantly, she’s been missing for 20 years. At a certain point, Castronovo decides to turn the investigation into a film, and partners with a producer, eventually flying to Prague to get the story made, only to himself go missing.
But that Castronovo is not the one telling this story. The film is made up of screen recordings, miniature recreations, and digital artifacts left behind by Castronovo — narrated by another enigma, one who wants to investigate Catronovo’s own story. A detective story in a detective story, a film within a film. There are many threads to be followed, all intersecting with each other at various narrative and thematic ends, marks of a well-measured product. The conceit of a removed narrator adds a layer of coldness to the work that might have been better served by more time with Castronovo. He’s clearly funny, though this only comes out in small moments that “facilitate” the narrator’s investigation of his own. In some moments, the character he plays feels made in the mold of Connor O’Malley’s “lost” young men — posing himself as a failing party clown, wearing suits he gets from catering gigs around town to pretend to be a noir detective, pretending to be an employee at A24 and MUBI. Indeed, the work has a very Gen Z quality to it — not only in its being communicated primarily through webcams and digital archival material, but through objects of significance to the generation, like video filters and vapes.
Debut’s documentary aspect is fascinating as a portrait of an artist at work, and though where fiction meets reality isn’t always clear, it’s obvious that Castronovo has manufactured a lot in service to the film. Of course, as the film says, “he is who he is,” and to that end he is who he pretends to be and his life is what he created, at least for a small portion. In this all sounds a bit on the nose, there’s no denying that autofiction seems to have become an increasingly popular trend with many young writers and filmmakers these days (My First Film, anyone?). But Castronovo does enough to separate his work from the genre that it manages to feel like something resembling a breath of fresh air, and a pleasant surprise in a subgenre increasingly saturating the young filmmaker landscape.
Published as part of Doc Fortnight 2025 — Dispatch 1.
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