The Audition Tapes documents the casting call for a project advertised in an acting magazine as “an experimental documentary on family history and memory.” The monologues and dialogues the actors deliver — which sometimes appear as subtitles — were developed from transcribed interviews with members of Tribe’s immediate family.
Each of the fifteen actors included in the tape speaks as one of four real characters. But as one watches, the stories they narrate begin to fragment, repeat themselves and contradict. Different accounts of the same events emerge and actors project their own desires and expectations onto the characters they portray.