Pigeon-livered

Pigeon-livered is a mixed-media, surreal short film set in a Human Resources department that has been mysteriously relocated to the middle of a field. It tells the story of an Intern who, despite clear instructions to be of no help, tries to make things better. He lives up a tree, the communications department—PigeonPost Co.—is on strike, and the Head of HR is still typing a letter she can’t remember starting. As the Intern strives to do what he believes is right, he begins to lose his grip on reality, and on himself.

From the outset, I wanted this to be a film about systems—specifically, the invisible systems that govern our behaviour and distort our sense of agency. We often describe jobs as “soul-destroying” or “dehumanising”, but rarely do we sit in that feeling and ask what it really looks like. This film tries to answer that in absurd, visual terms.

Drawing on Marxist ideas about labour and identity, the script treats work not just as a backdrop, but as a corrosive force. In Pigeon-livered, the Intern’s labour no longer affirms his individuality—it erases it. He is gradually stripped of his humanity, reconditioned by institutional routines, and ultimately transfigured into one of the very messengers he tried to help. The Lady, long since resigned to this cycle, represents the version of him that stays and forgets.

Technically, the project was ambitious. We shot on 16mm using an Arriflex 16BL camera, deliberately embracing the constraints of analogue filmmaking—grain, limitation, texture—as a way to heighten the tactile unreality of the world. The stop-motion animation elements allowed us to visualise characters and institutions that exist just outside the frame of our everyday experience, like Head Office, whose monstrous bureaucracy is brought to life through uncanny miniature sets and puppetry.

The choice to build a physical office in a field, with scale models, puppets, and minimal digital intervention, came from a desire to foreground process and play. We wanted to see what would happen when we took the rules of a rigid institution and dropped them into a setting that offered none of the structure it relies on. What emerged was a space of creative tension: between order and chaos, silence and noise, humour and horror.

This film could not have been made without the boundless dedication, patience, and imagination of our team. We worked through difficult weather, tight resources, and evolving ideas with the kind of camaraderie that stands in stark contrast to the systems we were critiquing. That contrast was not lost on us.

Ultimately, Pigeon-livered is a story about what happens when well-meaning individuals try to change broken systems from within—and what those systems do to them in return. It is strange, sad, and sometimes funny, but most of all it is a film made with love, from the middle of Knowhere.

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Jack Samson