A Man Dies, A Cockroach Sleeps

Time passes without permission.
Love promises permanence, then quietly leaves the room.
This experimental animated short meditates on waiting—on the fragile illusion that memory can hold what life refuses to keep. As silence thickens and absence becomes familiar, the film asks a quiet but unsettling question:
What truly survives when meaning dissolves?
Stripped of explanation and excess, the film unfolds as a suspended moment between loss and indifference—where human presence fades, yet existence continues without reflection.
A Man Dies, A Cockroach Sleeps invites the viewer not to understand, but to remain—inside discomfort, stillness, and the unsettling calm of survival.

  • Shorna Abedin
    Director
  • Shorna Abedin
    Writer
  • Shorna Abedin
    Producer
  • Project Type:
    Animation, Experimental, Short, Other
  • Runtime:
    2 minutes 15 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    February 10, 2026
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    4:3
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Digital Cinema Package:
    Unavailable
Director Biography - Shorna Abedin

Shorna Abedin is an independent filmmaker and visual artist working in experimental animation and philosophical cinema. Her work explores themes of time, memory, absence, and the quiet persistence of existence.
With a minimalist visual language and a strong emphasis on silence, atmosphere, and symbolism, she creates films that resist explanation and instead invite contemplation. Her approach favors emotional residue over narrative clarity, allowing viewers to inhabit uncertainty rather than resolve it.
A Man Dies, A Cockroach Sleeps marks her continued exploration of existential stillness through animated form.

Add Director Biography
Director Statement

This film was born from a simple, unsettling thought:
human life is meaningful to itself, but irrelevant to time.
I was interested in what remains when memory exhausts itself—when love, waiting, and loss no longer demand attention. Rather than telling a story, I wanted to suspend the viewer inside a state of quiet tension, where nothing dramatic happens, yet something irreversible has already occurred.
Animation allowed me to strip reality down to its emotional core. Silence became language. Stillness became movement. The presence of the cockroach is not metaphorical in a traditional sense—it exists as a reminder that survival does not require meaning, and existence does not mourn.
A Man Dies, A Cockroach Sleeps is not meant to be understood.
It is meant to be waited through.