SEPTEMBER 18 SELECTIONS

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"Close Enough" by Alex Hunter is a deeply avant-garde, experimental piece with a heartbeat of its own, uncategorized, unapologetic, and strangely familiar. It doesn’t tell a story so much as evoke a state: the liminal, ghostly feeling of hotel rooms as sites of suspended identity and fleeting intimacy. Through AI-manipulated images fed from both luxury hotels and personal archives, the film becomes a meditation on memory, desire, and the loneliness beneath surface freedom. 

It’s speculative, raw, and dreamlike, full of imperfections that may be accidental or entirely intentional, but either way they feed its eerie sincerity. This is cinema that bypasses logic and speaks directly to our unspoken longings, the ones we ignore in our rush to get from where we are to where we’re going. It may be loved or loathed, but either way, it lingers under your skin. And that, perhaps, is its quiet triumph. 

 "Before My Silence" by Axel Schilling is a haunting and exquisitely executed short that feels impossibly real, so much so that it’s hard to believe it’s AI-generated. A woman in a wheelchair, facing the sea one final time, becomes the quiet symbol of resistance, memory, and endurance. Her voice, in German, adds weight and history; the subtitles make sure we don’t look away. 

The performance is subtle, but the tension is profound, especially in the unspoken possibility that she may let herself go. It has the tone of a mockumentary, but the emotional pull of something sacred. Stylish in its stillness and deeply tuned to invisible pain, this is a masterful use of simplicity to say something vast and necessary.

Zero presents a richly layered, well-crafted narrative that doesn’t just ask whether AI can write, it asks what happens to the human ego when it no longer holds the pen. The premise is gripping: a celebrated novelist, crushed by the news that an AI named Zero has won the Nobel Prize in Literature, spirals into existential despair and seeks out the machine’s creator for answers.

Zero shows us the future of Literature, and also holds a mirror to us humans. Easy and at the same time somewhat disturbing to watch, it illuminates the core questions of Intellectual Property and identity in the time of AI 

 “Robin” by Barney Miller may be a retelling, but it’s no bedtime story. It’s a scalpel, not a sword, cutting through the legend to expose the rotten, human core of power itself. The narrator’s voice is absolutely delicious, smooth, intimate, quietly damning, like power whispering its confessions right into your ear. That “It’s not you, it’s me” framing flips everything on its head. Power owns the story. It’s not about justice anymore, but about the slow seduction of control.

The AI-enhanced visuals serve the metaphor well, polished, eerily timeless, like a fairy tale under surveillance. Technically clean, emotionally tight. It doesn’t overreach or overexplain. It trusts the viewer to feel the weight. This isn’t just about history. It’s a mirror held to any of us who think we’re the exception. You want to be the hero? Check your shadow first.