Franklin Ritch

Creator Context

Summary

Jacksonville independent writer-director-editor Franklin Ritch is known for the 2022 debut feature The Artifice Girl, a dialogue-heavy sci-fi thriller about an AI built to catch online predators and the ethics of trauma, autonomy, and machine personhood. Filmmaker Magazine named him one of its 25 New Faces of Independent Film in 2022. He built a local shorts slate (Bedridden, Still Life, Powerful, Chatter Box) and later Last Weekend, taught screenwriting in Florida, and took small acting parts in The Life of Chuck and No Sleep Till. Interviews and social posts stay craft-focused, with no recorded party work, donations, DEI roles, or activist affiliations. The main identity-adjacent choice on the record is writing Gareth as asexual; asked about it, Ritch said there is “not a lot of representation of asexual characters in film” and that he liked it being stated, while also saying he did not want asexuality treated as the character’s personality and used it mainly to cut off “creep” suspicions around a man deploying a digital child. That is a one-off beat inside an AI-ethics story, not a recurring representation-first career.