Tapped Out

Directed by Marina Zivkovic. 4min 58sec

Marina Zivkovic is a filmmaker, screenwriter, and multidisciplinary creative based in Australia.
After a career spanning law, education, and award-winning photography, Marina shifted her focus fully to storytelling on screen driven by a passion for exploring emotional depth, identity, and the gamut of human experience.

Her work combines surreal visual storytelling with grounded psychological truths, often centering underrepresented voices, particularly women navigating transformative life stages.
Tapped Out marks Marina’s second directorial foray in short film, bringing her background in visual composition, performance, and narrative structure into sharp focus.

Marina continues to develop projects that blend chaos, intimacy, humor, and mystery – creating cinematic spaces where vulnerability and resilience collide.

Director Statement

Tapped Out began with a simple question: how close are most of us to completely losing it over something tiny?

The film takes an everyday annoyance—a dripping tap—and escalates it into an absurd psychological spiral where overthinking, intrusive thoughts and relentless internal commentary begin to blur together. I was interested in capturing that strange space between anxiety, overstimulation, exhaustion and humour, where your own inner monologue can become louder than reality itself.

While the film leans heavily into absurd, surreal comedy and irreverence, underneath it is a portrait of a mind running at full volume. Whether the voices are real, imagined, or somewhere in between is intentionally left open to interpretation.

For me, the film isn’t really about losing touch with reality. It’s about the uncomfortable truth that most of us are already carrying on dozens of conversations inside our heads every day. We narrate, judge, argue, catastrophise, daydream and distract ourselves constantly. Most of the time, we’re simply accustomed to the noise. Tapped Out explores what happens when the volume gets turned up.