Projects on the horizon
DAY-O
a short film
In a seaside farming community where moderation is upheld and death is a foreign concept, a man becomes trapped in a sea cave. The dogmatic Sol concludes the man must be dead, eliciting in him an existential angst confronting death for the first time. He compensates by farming relentlessly, working past the allotted time. The younger, naive Joshua questions Sol’s break from order as he sips his daily soda, and takes umbrage at Sol’s insinuation of death.
An escalating argument between the two forces them both to retreat into isolation. That night, Sol works himself to exhaustion, Joshua drinks himself into oblivion, and the trapped resident is pulled out of the water, alive. An unexpected air bubble sustaining him, allowing him to breathe slow and steady. Death had not presented herself. Despite the resident surviving, Sol and Joshua worked and drank themselves to death that night, introducing mortality to their community.
REVEREND
a short film
Reverend is personal and confrontational examination of what it means to be human. More specifically whether the evil within us extinguishes even the most profound righteousness, and conversely whether goodness is absolving. It poses the question whether, as is true with a sunset, beauty is found when the darkness meets the light.
Set in the 1980s, the pastor of an emerging Detroit megachurch earnestly attempts to sway the deacons to abolish their long-held white-only membership policy while balancing the secrets of his own sins and the pressure of the public eye.CAPSULES
a short film
Starring Saffron Burrows and Eric Roberts, Capsules is a romantic science fiction short film set across five days at an experimental memory clinic of the near future. Lady and Guy arrive as strangers - two people who have signed up for the same treatment program but have no prior relationship. The clinic administers sensory treatments designed to reconstruct not the images of a memory but the feeling of one. Between treatments, in the hours between manufactured sensorial experience, Lady and Guy begin to fall in love.
The romance is silent, accumulative - built in glances and gestures, until they begin to sneak away together, venturing through imaginative, theatrical spaces that represent the images of their actual memories. The Burgundy Beach (yearnful, red), the Favorite Restaurant (nostalgic, purple), the Rose Garden (playful, orange), the Bathroom (introspective, void), and the Clinic itself (representative, reflective). As Lady and Guy drift farther away from the Clinic, their environments glitch around them - they run toward the Clinic, only to find it as a void. The constructed gone, their sensorial fields free from projected stimuli, Lady and Guy hold each other for the first time. They close their eyes, awaiting what comes. When their eyes open, they are still together, sitting in real sand, the tide of the real Pacific Ocean touching their feet. They continue to hold each other. Something real in a fabricated world.