There’s a disturbing story that floats around the internet about the British colonial era, often placed in India, though some versions shift it to parts of Africa. It describes British officers playing golf in the humid heat while flies and insects swarmed the course. To keep the pests away, they would get an indentured servant and smear him in jam, positioning him nearby so the sweetness would attract the insects toward him instead of the players. The boy would stand there as a human fly-trap while the game continued uninterrupted. His only payment, according to the folklore, was the jam itself, which he could scrape off and take home to his family. 

Debut filmmaker Sriram Emani takes that brutal imagery of a power dynamic rooted in exploitation and dehumanization, and pushes it into a dystopian near future in his short film Jam Boy, which premieres in competition at the DC Independent Film Festival on February 15, 2026.

Set in a futuristic, speculative America, the film follows an Indian immigrant named Sriram, played by Emani himself. In this world, survival runs on the currency of a credit system. You earn credits to function. You lose credits when the system glitches or penalises you. Your ability to move, work, or leave the country depends on numbers you don’t fully control.

The premise sits in the lineage of sci-fi stories built around quantifiable existence. In the 2011 film In Time, for example, characters use lifespan as money — transferring years of life between each other to pay for necessities. And on television, anthology series like Black Mirror have explored societies governed by opaque metrics or ratings that determine social status, opportunity, even freedom.

Jam Boy uses a similar premise, but grounds it in immigration and identity & labour politics tied directly to lived immigrant experiences. The protagonist has a regular job, but his credits get siphoned away because of glitches in the system, forcing him into unpaid overtime jeopardizing his ability to return home — a nod to visa problems immigrants face. Many immigrants in the U.S. live with sponsorship dependencies and the knowledge that bureaucratic shifts can alter their futures overnight. The credit system becomes a metaphor for that instability.

Sriram does his job and follows the rules, believing his effort will translate into security and upward mobility — something that many immigrants believe when they move in pursuit of ‘The American Dream’. But the short film also introduces a different perspective through another employee who insists that the system is rigged, and they would never let their workers leave unless you trick it or cheat, in order to escape.

Jam Boy taps into the themes of cultural erasure in its workplace politics. Employees are issued a bland, FDA-approved lunch cake, a shapeless mass designed for efficiency. Sriram, however, secretly brings tamarind rice, a dish his mother taught him to make, even though 'outside', food is prohibited, speaking to the long history of immigrant lunches being mocked, called 'smelly', and treated as alien. The short film depicts a system that wants immigrant labour and skill, but not their culture.

Emani draws from his own experience living in the United States. Visa complications, restricted mobility, and the constant pressure to prove one’s worth all surface through the film. The title links back to that colonial tale, where an oppressed body is exploited and has no real rights, tying it to the present-day notions of a ‘model minority’ that has to negotiate or even give up its identity to survive in the West. 

Follow Sriram here.

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