Audience Expectations from Genre

To understand if we were heading in the right direction we asked our audience the simple question what do you expect to see in a social realism film, here are a few of the responses:

"I'd expect to be able to relate really well to it and for it to feel real to me, so not like fake and overly edited I guess"

"Probably looking at the working class people? quite a lot of like drugs and stuff"

"I'd expect it to be revolved around contemporary lifestyles so people taking drugs and getting drunk and showing how things are romanticized when they're actually bad"

"based on real life and issues. For example drugs, crime, religious tension, poverty and any other issues in todays society"

We realise that these are the audiences typical expectations of genre, we could argue that our storyline contains elements of these; however we have begun to challenge the genre expectations by incorporating the very modern and very topical theme of social media. We feel that this is now an aspect of social realism as it is a part of everyone in this society's daily life.