14 mins
The film mixes the journey of a fictional character, an unknown entity played by drag performance artist Beaujangless, with documentary roadside encounters in a nocturnal car ride through the ‚City of Angels’. Observations of people passing by, accompanied by an AI-generated voice-over reciting first-person narratives from interviews, intertwine with sequences of the main character dancing to Holly Herndon‘s song ‚Frontier’. The film explores narratives as both center and limit of human world experience and self-awareness, the concept of an immortal human soul in neo-religious, dataist times, as well as the USA as a collective narrative of capitalist superiority in decay. ‚Because We Bleed‘ is a meditation on storytelling and a poetic journey into a new, dark age.