Jam Boy

Sriram is the ultimate role model. Polite. Optimized. Easy to love. He is the system’s favorite kind of citizen: the model minority who never makes trouble. The American Dream algorithm adores those like him even as they lose their sense of self.

When a bureaucratic excuse traps Sriram inside the system and threatens his ability to go home, he turns to the one thing the algorithm cannot fully regulate: his mother’s tamarind rice. What begins as comfort becomes a way of staying human. In a world that tracks everything, even remembering is dangerous. And thus begins a dangerous journey where Sriram must fight to break free from the cage.

Jam Boy is an introspective and unsettling sci-fi allegory about the quiet horror of being the Model Minority. It puts a spotlight on the stories of countless immigrants in the US who since decades have built and codified their lives around the American dream and find themselves trapped on a leash by an ever-changing immigration algorithm. It is a disappearance anthem that traces the psychology of model minorities that celebrate becoming invisible cogs that run the capitalist machinery powering today’s global economy.