Nina is a 6.5-minute horror-comedy about invisible labor, longing, and the absurdity of politeness. Set inside a historic lakeside lodge on Lake Superior, the film follows a lone worker whose needs for release warps the rituals of service into something uncanny.

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Shot with a skeleton crew in a functioning tourist lodge, Nina blurs the line between fiction and lived labor. Guests, family members, and town actors inhabit the same frame, resulting in a charged farce of a North Shore summer.

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Rooted in Natasha Mercado’s background in clown and physical comedy, the film uses silence, gesture, and repetition to explore how service becomes survival and how the unsaid can turn surreal.

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Nina is the first in a series of works examining the myth of hospitality through a Soft Clown lens: finding humor in dread and tenderness in dysfunction.