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Sorry for any confusion…
I’m not saying that it is not his apartment…or that the dream catcher isn’t his…or that Emma and Henry passed cameras that are filming them.
What I am saying is that it looks to me like Neal is in an undergraduate film class…an intro level type thing. In a class like this, several students team up and they have to film short projects that are just a few minutes long….and these projects focus on things like continuity, shadows, sound effects, parallel action…etc. So what we are seeing in the first 2 minutes of Broken is what Neal and his team are filming. The team films him walking out of Central Park, walking along the sidewalk, crossing the street…getting on the Subway…going up the elevator…coming into the apartment…throwing the backpack on the bed…”closing” the window…looking out at the fire escape etc. These are all part of what Neal and his team are filming. In film projects like this there are usually additional props brought in to help communicate an unspoken message. The whole idea of film projects like this is to try to communicate a story without words. So we are watching him “act” in a film project. But then something unexpected happens…while they are filming a bird flies onto the window sill…and it has postcard that says Broken.
If you watch for it, you can see the reflection of his film team (his fellow students) in the train window both inside and outside of the subway train. Neal is a student going to school and he is working on a project for a filmmaking class filmmaking class. That is what the first two minutes of Broken are about.