Theater of the Absurd

Theatre of the Absurd began as a series of photographs that wouldn't stay still.
I've spent decades creating photo-montages—elaborate, staged images that explore loneliness, disconnection, and the hidden emotional lives we carry. But recently, I found myself haunted by a different kind of question: How do ordinary people become complicit in their own oppression? How does a society rehearse its way into tyranny?
These questions led me to make my first film. Not despite being a photographer, but because of it. Every frame of Theatre of the Absurd begins as a photograph—carefully constructed, lit, and composed—then transformed through digital painting, montage, and AI morphing into moving tableaux. I think of it as photography that breathes, that shifts and morphs the way memory does.
The film unfolds in three acts: The Rehearsal, The Farce, and The Final Curtain. In the first act, we watch a woman in her kitchen tending to her cat as masks and uniforms quietly replace individuality around her. The rehearsal for tyranny begins in these small domestic moments. The second act turns the city into a grotesque circus where laughter conceals fear and performance becomes compliance. By the final act, all that remains are deserted streets, men sitting motionless in confinement, and a red swing moving in the wind—a haunting echo of something lost.
I'm drawn to the visual language of 1940s Eastern Europe—the brutalist architecture, the uniforms, the fog and shadow that convey the psychological weight of surveillance and control. But this isn't a period piece. I'm collapsing time deliberately, suggesting that these patterns are cyclical, that the mechanisms of power and obedience are timeless. The work asks: How do societies surrender individuality not through overt violence, but through habit, distraction, and performance? How easily does entertainment become propaganda? How quickly does spectacle replace truth?
My process is deeply rooted in photography. I stage each scene meticulously—the lighting, gesture, spatial tension—as if creating a still life or portrait. Then I use post-photographic tools to extend the image beyond the frozen moment, creating what I think of as "elastic time," where memory, imagination, and history coexist in the same frame. I'm interested in how photographs both reveal and obscure truth, how the camera—long associated with evidence and memory—can also become an instrument of distortion and denial. In an age of synthetic media and manipulated perception, this tension feels urgent.
I wanted the film to feel both cinematic and painterly, to exist in that space where photography, painting, and cinema converge. The muted color palette, the chiaroscuro lighting, the symbolic props—all of this creates a world that's both familiar and deeply uncanny.
Collaboration has been essential. Gabriel Chwojnik composed the original score in constant dialogue with the imagery. His music oscillates between dissonance and fragile melody, amplifying the visual rhythm and deepening the emotional register. Together, image and sound construct a psychological landscape that hovers between beauty and dread.
At the heart of the film is a recurring motif: state-sponsored entertainment as distraction. An absurdist circus of mimes, clowns, objectified women, and caged beasts becomes a metaphor for how authoritarian regimes use spectacle to anesthetize and control. The mime—my central figure—is forced into silence, performing desperate warnings that go unheeded. She embodies the artist, the truth-teller, the witness who sees clearly but cannot make herself heard above the noise of the circus.
This connects directly to my background. Before becoming an artist full-time, I worked as a therapist with marginalized communities. I've always been drawn to figures on the edges, to those whose voices are systematically ignored. My time as a therapist taught me to see the psychological mechanisms of denial and complicity—how we turn away from what we don't want to see, how we participate in systems that ultimately harm us.
The film also reflects my feminist lens. Women's bodies become sites of control, marked and sorted, their agency systematically stripped away. Some women collaborate with their oppressors, mistaking proximity to power for safety. Others resist, but their resistance is rendered invisible, transformed into mime's performance—urgent, desperate, and ignored.
What draws me to this moment in history—both the 1940s and now—is the simultaneity of it all. The past never fully disappears; it reemerges in new forms. We're living through a moment of rehearsal right now. Patterns are being established. Lines are being drawn. Democratic institutions are being tested. Women's bodily autonomy is under threat. And too many of us are watching the circus, entertained by the spectacle, while the warnings go unheeded.
Theatre of the Absurd is my attempt to make these patterns visible, to slow them down and render them in images both beautiful and disturbing. I want viewers to feel the weight of complicity, to recognize themselves in the audience applauding the circus even as dissenters vanish into shadow. The film is a meditation on the fragile boundaries between truth and illusion, freedom and submission, laughter and fear.
I'm also exploring what photography can be in the twenty-first century—both evidence and invention, both witness and dream. By blurring the boundaries between authentic and artificial, staged and real, still and moving, I'm questioning the reliability of images themselves. In an age where we can no longer trust what we see, how do we bear witness? How do we hold onto truth?
The absurd, as Ionesco and Beckett understood, is not merely theatrical invention. It's a mirror held up to reality, showing us the inherent meaninglessness of authoritarian logic, the circular arguments that trap us, the performances we're forced to enact. My figures are neither heroes nor victims—they're witnesses to the fragility of freedom and the endurance of the human spirit.
Ultimately, this film is both a reflection on the past and a warning for the present. It's about the seductive allure of authoritarianism, how it creeps in through small compromises, how it turns entertainment into anesthesia and compliance into performance. It's about the necessity of vigilance, empathy, and critical thought in protecting the fragile freedoms that define our shared humanity.
But it's also about hope, strange as that may sound. The mime continues performing even when no one watches. The red swing still moves. Memory persists.