BIOS
David Rafailedes is a writer, director, and producer from Canton, Ohio, surviving in New York City. He is a 2024 Sundance Screenwriters Fellow and dual degree student (MBA/MFA) at NYU pursuing a graduate degree in film. Rafailedes is the co-writer and co-creator of the hit comedic play, Cellino v. Barnes, that will return Off-Broadway in 2024. Prior to graduate school, he was the digital department head on two Stephen Colbert-produced television shows. Rafailedes is the recipient of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Feature Film Production Grant and the Sundance Institute Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship. He has a wonderful wife and two children so he spends most of his free time convincing his toddler not to touch garbage on the NYC street.
Sara Crow is a Brooklyn-based writer/director whose stories center subcultures and misfits. She is a 2024 Sundance Screenwriters Lab fellow and the recipient of the Sloan Sundance Fellowship with “Satoshi.” “Satoshi” received the $100,000 Sloan Feature Film Prize at NYU and is currently in pre-production. Her debut narrative short film “Bluebird” won “Best Short Film” at the Montana International Film Festival and the New Jersey Film Festival. “Bluebird” received the Black Family Film Prize at NYU’s Graduate Film program, where she is a Martin Scorsese Scholar. Her upcoming thesis film “Why I Am an Anarchist” received NYU’s AnnaRose King Award for Comedic Storytelling. Her background in journalistic documentaries bleeds into her narrative work; Sara loves world-building and diving into secret and little known histories.
DIRECTOR STATEMENT
Before writing this film, neither of us were particularly interested in cryptocurrency, but the more we researched for “Satoshi,” the more our expectations were subverted. We were surprised to learn that Bitcoin’s origins, and those who championed it, were radical and idealistic, a far cry from thecontroversial world of crypto we’ve come to know.
Many in the early crypto community were, like our lead, Kimi, young adults in 2008 when Satoshi’s Bitcoin White Paper came out. They called themselves “cypherpunks,” an odd and fascinating group of cryptography nerds that wanted to change the world with privacy-enhancing tech. Like CBGB to punk rock, this subculture was active and loud in their corner of the internet.
We were also teenagers during the financial crisis and the birth of Bitcoin. These were formative years to see institutions collapse and friends and family lose everything. While we were unaware of Bitcoin at the time, the idea behind it would have appealed to us, but we didn’t know about it because we only used the internet for Facebook.
“Satoshi” is about Bitcoin, but it’s also about youthful idealism and how breaking the system might not turn out the way you intended.
SYNOPSIS: SATOSHI
The potentially true story of a teenage anime-obsessed hacktivist who, after losing her scholarship to Stanford, returns home to Arizona to become the mysterious inventor of a new digital currency.