“I am not a shadow.”

What does it feel like to be observed? Who holds the power: the one looking or the one being looked at?

Aden (Nabhaan Rizwan), an actor hoping to break into the UK film industry, faces a series of challenges that makes him question his desire to be accepted by a system that wasn’t built to include him and how far he will push himself to be a cog in the machine.

Aden is on the floor in one of his first acting gigs where he is playing a dead body covered in blood. Although he is not moving or speaking, this is a break for him as it’s his first television part and he is in a scene with the main character Actor A (Aston McAuley) in a TV cop drama. When his scene is finished, Aden is escorted off the studio floor, with ruined clothes and a face still full of pale make up.

When he returns to his flat in Manchester, England, his exhausted flatmate Bo (Rory Fleck Byrne) is studying for an upcoming medical exam. Struggling to make ends meet, they have found a new flatmate Conrad (Amir El-Masry), a confident and suave fashion and lifestyle brand ambassador.

With rent due, Aden goes on a series of demoralising auditions where he is picked from a line up of other Brown actors wearing uniformed white T-shirts and jeans. After a humiliating process where junior studio execs randomly select “authentic Brown faces” for their ad campaigns, Aden also interviews for a teeth-whitening commercial but isn’t successful there either, nor does he land the part as high school American heart throb Kyle in an American television series.

After a cynical pep talk from Conrad about how the industry needs more diversity and spurred on by uncomfortable jealousy, Aden seeks out more auditions. He finally lands a job role-playing as the dead son of a grieving mother (Josie Walker) going through therapy. What happens next is a disturbing nightmare of events that makes us question the ethics of making work where commodification is valued above humanity.

A dream and a nightmare in a blender, IN CAMERA is the first feature from writer-director Naqqash Khalid. IN CAMERA sees the filmmaker break with the norms of conventional filmmaking, creating a dialogue between the observer and the observed, making a satirical comment on contemporary race politics.