“Aphasia” is the first of actress Robin Rose Singer’s scripts to be made into a movie. It’s the second film she’s produced. And look where it’s premiering: the illustrious Tribeca Film Festival.

The North Stonington native’s “Aphasia” was selected from 3,000 submissions to be among the 60 works screened during the April fest co-founded by Robert DeNiro. It’ll be shown alongside six other short, technology-themed pieces on April 16.

It is, not to put too fine a point on it, a huge deal.

Getting the January phone call from Tribeca programmers, telling her that the 11-minute “Aphasia” had been accepted there “was incredibly exciting,” Singer says.

Singer produced the movie independently with her and actress-producer Olivia Bosek’s company, A Small Fire Productions; the company had previously produced “Sideswiped,” a short comedy that Bosek wrote and starred in.

They had submitted “Aphasia” to a number of major film festivals — “the pipe-dream ones like Tribeca,” Singer says with a laugh.

“You strategize where you want to have the world premiere, because a lot of people want to see it first,” she says.

“Aphasia” is set in 2018, in a slightly more extreme but still recognizable version of the present. It’s a sci-fi/drama — but sci-fi in the sense that “Twilight Zone” was. Singer stars as a woman who, as the Tribeca publicity notes, “comes face to face with the consequences of her dependence on technology — and loses something she may never regain.” Co-starring is Frankie J. Alvarez of HBO’s “Looking.”

Here’s what inspired Singer to create the “Aphasia” story: She was sitting in a New York City restaurant, waiting for a friend when she noticed what was — and wasn’t — going on all around her. Instead of lots of chit-chat and social interaction, people at other tables were thoroughly engrossed in their phones — texting and taking photos of their food and checking messages.

“It was really strange for me to see that,” she recalls.

That’s especially true for someone like Singer, who spent little time with technology when she was growing up in North Stonington. Her family got perhaps four channels on their TV. Her parents, Art and Stacey Singer (who now live in Panama), didn’t allow Robin or her younger sister Heidi to play video games. Instead, the focus was on going outside and doing something fun and interactive.

“We literally left the house at 9 a.m. in the summer and didn’t come back until dinner. ... It was freedom. We played in the woods all day,” Singer says.

So she has been particularly struck by how riveted kids now are by technology.

“It’s kind of scary to see how quickly it has headed in that direction for a younger generation,” she says.

How can they bond and connect with anyone, she wonders, if they’re focused on their gadgets and devices all the time?

With all this technology obsession, she says, “The question in my head is just: what are we losing without even realizing it?”

Those ideas spawned Singer’s script.

“Aphasia” — which, Singer says, they created “as sort of a calling card for our company” — ended up being shot over the course of four days in various New York City locations.

While “Aphasia” might cast a critical eye toward the omnipresence of modern technology, the team turned, ironically enough, to crowd-funding to finance the movie. They eventually raised $12,000.

“I realized pretty much the first day that there’s no way we’re going to be make this little anti-technology film without emails and Twitter and Facebook and all of this other stuff,” she says.

Singer figures she spent 35 days straight being on Facebook, Twitter and email.

“It felt very strange. I don’t want to say hypocritical. It was shocking — maybe we do need this,” she says.

Another upside of the process: through social media, Singer reconnected with a lot of North Stonington folks she hadn’t spoken to in a long time.

Growing up in southeastern Connecticut, Singer danced with Mystic Ballet for years but wasn't an actress. Her only acting experience was playing a daughter whose father had just returned from sea for Thanksgiving in one of Mystic Seaport's Lantern Light Tours.

She graduated from Wheeler High School in 1999 and went on to New York University, but she wasn't sure what she wanted to do. She gravitated toward learning Spanish, figuring she could travel and work abroad.

Singer got her bachelor's degree in Spanish literature from NYU. After that, she was a musician in a pop-rock band for a few years. And then, finally, she realized she wanted to act.

"I was reading this book. It asks you, if you could do anything with your life, what would you do? I just wrote down right away, 'Acting,' which was strange because I had no inclination before that to be an actor," Singer says. "But the thing that appeals to me about it is that you get to live all these different lives. You get to learn so much about people. It teaches you so much empathy. And you're a storyteller."

So she began auditioning. One audition went well, even though Singer didn't have all the professional aspects nailed down at that point; she thinks she printed her headshot out on her computer.

The folks in the audition, she recalls, "gave me great feedback. They were actually the people that said, 'You have no training, no credits, but you have some talent so you should pursue this.'"

She studied. She auditioned. She eventually booked some parts and worked her way from there.

Singer says she's been fortunate to work with some really wonderful people and great writing, but she adds that, during the gaps between those projects, "you want to put all your tools to use."

Toward that end, she turned to writing. Her scripts have done well in screenplay and festival competitions, but "Aphasia" is the first one to be made into a completed film.

Her decision to write, she says, “kind of came about — I don’t want to say out of frustration, but it’s hard sometimes to find parts that speak to you as a woman a lot of times. So I wanted to tell stories that I felt were important and started writing scripts based on that. It was important to me that I was being fully utilized as an actor.”

And she decided to produce projects herself because she didn’t want to wait for anyone else to do it. With “Aphasia,” she has made her own luck.

“Aphasia,” written and co-produced by star Robin Rose Singer, premieres on April 16 at the Tribeca Film Festival. It will also stream on the Tribeca website from April 17 to 25.

In May, it will play at the Short Film Corner at the Cannes Film Festival. The Short Film Corner is part of the film market side of Cannes, and the screenings are for industry people, with moviemakers hoping to license films to international buyers. Entries selected for “official competition” in Cannes won’t be announced until mid-April.