FEED
IN DEVELOPMENT | PSYCHOLOGICAL BODY HORROR
LOGLINE
After a career setback deepens her isolation, a young photographer takes a server job at Rosemary’s, a cult-favorite Brooklyn restaurant whose intoxicating promise of community, desire and creative belonging draws her toward escalating psychological and bodily danger.
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
Violet is a gifted young photographer whose work gives form to emotions she cannot face in herself. Broke, isolated and questioning whether she belongs in the art world, she is pulled toward Rosemary’s, a cult-favorite Brooklyn restaurant with a magnetic staff and an after-hours culture built on appetite, performance and access. What begins as a lifeline—steady money, creative peers and the thrill of being seen—becomes an immersive new identity. Under the influence of the restaurant’s formidable namesake and the women who make its dining room feel like a private universe, Violet learns how attention, desire and status can be sold. As the boundary between empowerment and exploitation erodes, Rosemary’s reveals a predatory logic that threatens Violet’s body, her art and her sense of self.
ABOUT THE PROJECT
FEED grew from writer-director Jenny Leigh Reed’s years working across restaurant jobs, where intense camaraderie and creative energy existed alongside economic dependence, sexual harassment and routine pressure to make guests feel powerful. The film channels that lived experience into body horror, using the restaurant as both seductive community and transactional stage. Through Violet’s photographic gaze, FEED examines what it means to be watched, desired, consumed and exploited while still aching to belong.
Lead producer Peter Phok is actively developing FEED with Reed and producer Daisy Risher Hamilton, contributing genre experience, production strategy and planning as the project advances. Phok participated in the project’s Frontières presentation in 2025.
DEVELOPMENT
FRONTIÈRES
2025
Presented at Frontières in 2025 as part of the project’s continuing development.
CREDITS
Writer / Director
Jenny Leigh Reed
Lead Producer
Peter Phok
Producers
Daisy Risher Hamilton
Jenny Leigh Reed
FEED is currently in development. For sales, financing, co-production and other project inquiries, contact Peter Phok at Phok Productions.