Photocopied Distance
A hornet that is stuck inside a photocopier is unable to fly. With nowhere left to go before its inevitable demise, the hornet begins reminiscing a birthday greeting from the past.
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Aki RedDirector
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Aki RedWriter
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Aki RedProducer
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Project Type:Experimental, Short, Student
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Runtime:3 minutes
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Completion Date:August 12, 2021
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Country of Origin:Philippines
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Country of Filming:Philippines
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Language:English, Tagalog
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Shooting Format:Digital
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Aspect Ratio:16:9
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Film Color:Black & White
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First-time Filmmaker:No
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Student Project:Yes - De La Salle - College of Saint Benilde
Aki Red is a 21 - year old student filmmaker from the De La Salle - College of Saint Benilde who seeks to further hone his skills in storytelling and other visual arts. He has a strong passion for using film as a medium to shape the way the society works, and to provide the moviegoing audience unique stories that cater to the human experience. His short films have won in local film festivals in the Philippines, and had been selected in film festivals from the United States, Croatia, Brazil, Pakistan, and India.
Hornets fly from one plant to another, traveling a variety of distances to pollinate flowers and stimulate growth. Once pollinated, these flowers undergo a natural process where the end result is the possibility for new plant offspring in the form of seeds. It’s comparable to an act of nurturing love — the continual reproduction and survival of these plant species are made possible through these pollinators.
But, what happens when these pollinators are devoid of their ability to fly? Who will now nurture these acts of love for one’s existence to continually exist as time moves forward?
The dying moments of a hornet are juxtaposed to the repetitiveness of the birthday greetings the filmmaker’s mother received from some the filmmaker’s distant relatives residing in the United States. These words are supposedly acts of nurturing love that unfortunately begin to lose their meaning because of a certain “distance”. The situation is further worsened by the inability of both families to have necessary funds to shoulder the expenses of both incoming and outgoing flights between the United States and the Philippines.
In a way, the hornet, unable to fly on-screen, represents something “dying” in the relationship between these two distant families; it could be the authenticity of the love that once was, or the roots of identities slowly forgotten. Nonetheless, something is definitely in the process of dying and no one from both sides are seeking solutions to these problems. What do these families do instead? They hide behind the sweet words and actions. They choose to cope up with repetitive “photocopied” words which inevitably widen the distance and cause the slow death of the relationship in between. Little do they know that this passivity has its consequences: the catalysts of these photocopied words, just like printers, will eventually run out of ink. Everything fades into oblivion, and the nurturing of love ceases to exist.
In the end, only one state of the bug is left: the one that is dying alone. That moment is then photocopied multiple times in the final frame — a frame of loneliness and regret. The stacking of multiple copies forms a “light in the end of the tunnel” - like image surrounding the hornet. It is now irreversibly dead.