Private Project

Manifesto of Feeble and Bitter Love

The screen is a wound. A lamentation field.

Manifesto of Feeble and Bitter Love is a six-minute cameraless direct animation on a single thirty-meter roll of 16mm film. Worked through staining, layering, and physical distress, the film generates a haunted field: an environment of deeply saturated, glowing color and chromatic rupture that the viewer inhabits more than observes.

This film is haunted by its materials, by bodies captured in peripheral space, and by the temporal moment of its making. Its score is constructed from two seconds of air from a Gaza news clip: the negative space between cries of anguish. Like a shadow, that charged air is summoned to retain the outline of what cast it. Air inscribed with lives dismissed and abandoned by imperial power. From these two seconds, a six-minute polyphonic sound mass is conjured. Its frequencies slide, collide, and sink through a spectral field of suspension. Bypassing the photographic window and the documentary gaze, the film refuses the spectacular image economy that circulates atrocity without feeling.

Film as elegy. A howl against devastation.

  • Abinadi Meza
    Director
  • Abinadi Meza
    Producer
  • Abinadi Meza
    Composer
  • Project Type:
    Animation, Experimental, Short
  • Genres:
    Art, Avant garde, handmade, cameraless, analog, 16mm
  • Runtime:
    6 minutes
  • Completion Date:
    November 14, 2025
  • Country of Origin:
    Mexico, United States
  • Shooting Format:
    16mm
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
Director Biography - Abinadi Meza

Abinadi Meza (MX/US) is a Hñähñu artist, filmmaker, and composer. He is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome (FAAR). Trained in painting and architectural theory, Meza configures the moving image as a site of physical contact. His Elemental Cinema treats the 16mm substrate as a tactile, metabolic, and synesthetic document.

He utilizes hand-layered processes and electronic sound masses to produce chromatic depth and luminous transparency. Meza activates electromagnetic phenomena, tectonic signals, and frequency interference to develop compositions where sound and image unfold as a resonant body. His work is distributed by the Film-Makers’ Cooperative (New York) and has screened at Anthology Film Archives, Cineteca Nacional de México, and international festivals including Kasseler Dokfest, Punto y Raya, and Crossroads. His live sound performances and installations have been presented at the Walker Art Center, MAXXI, and the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA).

Add Director Biography
Director Statement

This film began with two seconds of air. In news footage from Gaza, a man recently released from an Israeli prison stood in the street, crying out in anguish: where is Gaza, where are the people, where is the world. I found his grief devastating and knew the documentation was important. But I did not want to exploit his voice or his words. There is a politics of sound as there is a politics of images. To sample his cries would be to extract his voice from its site, to deploy his anguish within an art object. To displace him, once again. Instead I turned to the intervals between his cries; the shared airspace of that street, collective by nature, already inhabited by other voices, other lives, other sounds. The open air is not silence; it is a commons, charged with collective presence and grief.

From that two-second material I composed the entire six-minute soundtrack, amplifying frequencies already present in that air into a descending polyphonic mass of tones that moves downward through the full duration of the film. The sound does not come from outside the material. It comes from within it.

The hand-rendered filmstrip is a record of duration and contact. Through staining, spraying, and marking, its layers accumulate the surrounding world: dust, hair, pollen embedded in the substrate as it slowly dries. When the strip is bent, crushed, or handled, the layers of pigment fracture and fall away, leaving fissures and fractures that become visible in the final image. The material is distressed and from that distress, light emerges differently. The colors (deep reds, oranges, chromatic saturations that evoke fire and explosive force) were already present in the material before I heightened them digitally. What the amplification revealed was already there, as with the two seconds of air from Gaza. This is when I made the connection to the Lux Nova of Gothic cathedrals; to what became possible inside them, with a new kind of light so specific it had to be named. For the first time, people could sit inside this new colored light. The worked filmstrip transforms from damaged artifact into an environment of light.

The title is a resonant fragment from the poet Tristan Tzara, who also worked within a context of outrage and helplessness in the face of brutality, more than a hundred years ago. It names the feeble, precarious, and bitter feeling of life in the face of systematic destruction. This film is an elegy and a protest. It reclaims the capacity to summon.