Violet

Violet is the first of a series of short films that make up the Requiem collection, a project initially begun as an acoustic songwriting project focused on the paradoxes of existential choice in our age of extinction.

In its film form, Violet is a tiny giant, wagering the need for a certain kind of mental fitness for the gravity, and the rites of passage, that characterise a search for selfhood amidst the volatile stakes of environmentalism. Equally, Violet is a thought experiment trained on the empowering role of the imagination as it measures the choice to remain within the world for the sake of love.

Staged on a miniature vintage book theatre set, and leaning heavily on iconographic symbolism (in particular, the binarised soul of light and darkness), Violet inhabits the nebulous territory of dream state to bring the mind’s plural slipstreams to life. With Violet comes a burlesque vision of the psyche, where childhood memories of animal cruelty, eclectic extinction notices, peculiar zoological proofs and an ark-like figurine collection coalesce amidst a whimsy for transformation, a defiant will to endure, and the visualisation of intention.

Violet’s hybridised elements of electroacoustic soundscape, live dance theatre, stop motion animation and poetry collude, not only to capture a sense of the metamorphosis and enchantment characteristic of early surrealist cinema, but to find expression for the more haunting unthinkable, unsayable truths that influence an ethics of existence in our time.