SOUND MIRAGE

The desire to find something lost can become incredibly powerful. But there are forces outside of us, operating invisibly, that may keep those answers out of reach. In SOUND MIRAGE, we are looking for the things we can’t see. Lost things. The story focuses on a disappearance, and explores our desire to uncover truth and the intersections between human will and the invisible movement of fate.

This story of Frank and Mila unfolds over just twelve and a half minutes. Though brief, this vignette is really a window to a larger narrative, which stretches into the future and the past of Mila’s disappearance. The full story is this: as the couple walks through the arching angles of the desert, they come across a mysterious place that immediately fills Mila with dread. Frank feels it too, but he can’t resist his desire to know more, and he secretly takes a token from the site: the tooth of an unknown animal. Shortly after, the pair is separated. Deep in the desert mountains, surrounded for miles by sloping sand and dry brush, the desert plays tricks on you, and it is easy to become disoriented. Only Mila makes it back to the car. Frank does not - he is lost, stranded in the desert to die. Left alone, Mila searches for him and as the days pass, old missing posters become faded under the bright white desert sun.

What we see on screen in SOUND MIRAGE - Frank’s desperate search for Mila through the piercing sounds of wind and sun - is the mirage. His dying wish.

But this inversion doesn’t mean that Frank’s world can be dismissed as simply a dream or hallucination. Desires have their own gravity. Depicting only the unsettling mystery of Frank’s perspective (invaded as we see by the pressure of his body’s fate), rather than reveal explicitly the alternate timeline, begs the questions that fascinate us most: How much power can human will have over fate? Will time always plow down the illusions we build by its unrelenting and indifferent progress? Or can a profound human desire create its own gravity and become something more than illusion?