Excerpt from Out Of Office, 2025. Full video available on request
Out Of Office, 2025
In this deliciously bleak corporate satire, a perceptive but perpetually silenced Office Girl stumbles upon a sinister liquidation scheme. At VILCORP, a villainous corporation steeped in the outdated racism and sexism of the 80s, her warnings fall on deaf ears.
She escapes into People Food HQ, the utopian workplace of the future, led by Office Girl’s hero, the charismatic entrepreneur Parsley Peppercorn. At People Food, with its outdoor beanbags and lunchtime yoga, you’re not just an employee, you’re family.
But like all families, People Food has its secrets. Beneath the millennial sheen of this sustainable snack startup lies something deeply fishy. Office Girl soon realises that Parsley Peppercorn might be peddling the same time-warped misogynoir as VILCORP but slicked in Y2K polish. And there is an even darker secret about People Food’s prawn cocktail products lurking just beneath the surface…
Using absurdity to mask its despondency, Out Of Office exposes the structural injustice of late stage capitalism, revealing that exploitation never goes out of style - it just gets better branding.
Too Happy Artist Commission 2025 Out Of Office by Kialy Tihngang
Out Of Office is an autoethnographic exploration of misogynoir and neo-capitalism. The film draws on dismal personal experiences from the office jobs of my twenties, and more widely, the structural silencing of Black women in historic and contemporary workplaces.
Having worked in both chauvinistic, male-dominated offices filled with racist, sexist and homophobic banter; and female-led offices whose outwardly glossy corporate feminism nonetheless upheld these same structural oppressions, I have realised that the meaningless morning meeting platitudes are never enough to disguise a rotten core of overwork, underpayment, bullying and exploitation.
Out Of Office uses all-too-familiar dystopian narratives and an anachronistic visual language to expose this core. It follows a silenced Black woman from one villainous corporation to another, increasing in absurdity as freedom from corporate oppression falls further and further from reach.
‘Out Of Office’, 2025 (stills)
Single-channel video, 19 minutes 20 seconds
Written and Directed by Kialy Tihngang
Starring
Laura Lovemore as Office Girl
Kirsty Punton as Parsley Peppercorn
Buom Tihngang as Admin Boy
David R Montgomery as CEO
Cariad Williams as Pregnant Woman
Ciara Dunne, Josefin Bagge, and Rachel Maclean as People Food™ employees
Matthew Zajac as CEO voice
Produced by Josefin Bagge from & Ciara Dunne from Too Happy Studios
Executive Producers Beth Allan, Rachel Maclean & Nicky Wilson
Cinematography by Jamie Quantrill
Original Composition by Not Sarah
Sound Design & Mix by William Aikman
Editor Ciaran Lyons
Visual Effects by Maruisz Pfeifer
Camera Assistant Mike Edwards
Lighting Assistant Amy Urquhart
Hair and Makeup Artist Kala Williams
Costume Assistant Ciara Dunne
Sound Recordist Aiden McDonach
Camera and Lighting Trainee James Kitson
Runner/Driver Luke Keogh
Model Set Design & Construction Kialy Tihngang
Additional Model Construction Sophia Cavalluzzi
Model Set Painting Charmaine Stewart
Additional Graphic Design Kialy Tihngang & Shipei
VILCORP Nails Lyndsay Smith
Titles and Credits Mariusz Pfeifer
Out Of Office was made for the 2024 Too Happy Studios Artist Moving Image Commission, a partnership between Too Happy Studios, Forest of Black, and Glasgow Short Film Festival, with support from Film & Video Umbrella and Jupiter Artland.