Experiencing Interruptions?

Engines

From the rust of the dead, comes the light of the new.

  • Charlie Jimenez
    Director
  • Charlie Jimenez
    Writer
  • Patrycja Pietras
    Producer
  • Grace Phyllis Silver-Smith
    Key Cast
    "Phanes"
  • Jeorge Guy
    Key Cast
    "Motorcyclist"
  • Zara Sands
    Key Cast
    "Dancer"
  • Project Type:
    Experimental, Music Video, Short
  • Genres:
    Fantasy, Visual-Poem, Spectacle
  • Runtime:
    4 minutes 17 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    November 6, 2025
  • Production Budget:
    4,000 GBP
  • Country of Origin:
    United Kingdom
  • Country of Filming:
    United Kingdom
  • Language:
    No Dialogue
  • Shooting Format:
    Super 16
  • Film Color:
    Black & White
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    Yes
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Digital Cinema Package:
    Unavailable
Director Biography - Charlie Jimenez

Charlie Jimenez (b. 2001, London) is a multidisciplinary artist and
creative director working across photography, sfx, film, and live
performance. Their practice explores the human body as a vessel - a site
of mythology, memory, and transformation. Charlie creates ritualistic
tableaux where the seams between the ethereal, grotesque, and surreal
merge in visceral spectacles of theatrics and dreamscapes. Charlie’s
images are characterized by abject characters in liminal settings which
border on dream-like and otherworldly. Non-linear and phantasmagorical
in tone, their creations encourage close attention to motion and sound,
their images dwell in the spaces between becoming and unbecoming.
The human body becomes a site of transformation,- presenting an
invented mythology. Drawing on personal experience, ritual, folklore, and
fiction, Charlie’s visions offer intimate, often disquieting spaces for
audiences to witness embodiment of the seldom seen, and remade.
Charlie’s work has been exhibited and screened across Europe,
including their award-winning short film Keratin, which won Best Short at
ASVOFF 2024. Their practice has been featured in Dazed, Kaltblut,
ShowStudio, and Nasty Magazine, with artistic collaborations including
FKA Twigs (Eusexua concert), HMLTD, and Jockstrap. They hold a First-
Class Honours degree from Central Saint Martins (Performance: Design
& Practice BA).

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Director Statement

As a non-binary artist, I experience existence as continual transformation — a process of shedding and becoming. To live beyond binary is to inhabit fluidity: to be both body and myth. Our society often seeks to erase or commodify our difference. Transness and queerness have always been apart of human expression.
Engines emerged from a poem by Sissy Misfit which describes trans bodies as “engines for utopia.”

For me, art is a utopia — a space of ghosts and becoming, where we commune with both the living and the dead through visions of light and shadow. Images speak across eras, to assert our presence against erasure.

This image resonated deeply — the idea that trans and non-binary existence is not just an identity, but a way of seeing, of continually imagining new worlds. Myth became a way to reconcile emotional truths with the cosmic ones. I reimagine the myth of Phanes as a journey of becoming – where the discarded, the wounded, and the nonconforming reclaim their inner power. Phanes to me, is the embodiment of persistence: damaged yet luminous, wounded yet divine— a drive of creation. Here, pain is not an end but a passage — a metamorphosis through light and becoming. It is the place where the fragmented self is reassembled into something radiant and ungovernable.