Private Project

Rewind

Aboard a train moving through strange, desolate landscapes, a cat with a tape recorder for a head and a monkey with a camera for a head live in an unlikely symbiosis — tethered by their tails, they record and store the world around them. A machine rewards their cooperation with treats, conditioning them into a rhythm of capture and playback.
But when the monkey's hunger for reward outgrows the system's design, something breaks — and what spills out is more than either of them bargained for. Hidden beneath the surface of their shared routine lies a question neither was meant to ask: who were they before all of this?
What follows is a tender and violent unraveling. One wants to push forward. The other needs to rewind. And the machine that once connected them to something larger watches it all fall apart.
Recordando is a stop-motion film about memory, conditioning, and the cost of curiosity — and about what it means to keep searching for an answer even when everything around you has gone to static.

  • Philip C Philip
    Director
  • Project Title (Original Language):
    recordando
  • Project Type:
    Animation, Experimental, Short
  • Runtime:
    4 minutes 56 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    October 31, 2025
  • Production Budget:
    300 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    Spain
  • Country of Filming:
    Spain
  • Language:
    No Dialogue
  • Shooting Format:
    digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    Yes - bau college of arts and design
  • Digital Cinema Package:
    Unavailable
Director Biography - Philip C Philip

Director Biography
Philip C Philip is an interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker based in Barcelona, working across stop-motion animation, interactive media, and experimental film. Originally from India, he has spent the last decade moving between London and Barcelona, collecting degrees and obsessions in roughly equal measure — cinematography, sound engineering, animation, and game design.
His work keeps returning to the same questions: how memory shapes identity, how systems condition behaviour, and how the strange and the familiar can illuminate each other. He is drawn to the spaces where technology and the organic meet — not always comfortably.
Recordando is his stop-motion thesis film, made at BAU Barcelona. He is currently researching interactive media as a tool for ecological storytelling at Universitat de Vic.

Add Director Biography
Director Statement

I've always been fascinated by the way memory works — not as a reliable archive but as something fragile, reconstructed, and deeply tied to who we think we are.
Recordando began as a question I couldn't quite shake: what happens when the act of remembering is taken out of your hands? The cat and the monkey aren't just characters — they're something closer to a feeling I recognise. The sense of going through motions you didn't choose, being rewarded for performing a version of yourself, and then one day wondering what was there before all of that.
I was drawn to stop-motion because the medium itself feels like memory — physical, imperfect, built frame by frame from things you can hold. The train came from thinking about how neuroscience describes memory retrieval: signals moving through corridors, lighting up briefly, fading. The scientist at the photo booth was there from the beginning, even when I didn't fully understand why.
I'm interested in surrealism not as an aesthetic but as an honest way of describing interior experience. Dreams, grief, confusion — these don't move in straight lines. Neither does this film.