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The Light  
(Elijah Gallimore, 2025)

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DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

The Light emerged from an initial concept centred on paranoia and the unsettling feeling of being watched—an exploration of “self-policing” and the subconscious performance we enact under imagined surveillance. Although originally intended to evoke a more directly disturbing tone, the project evolved into a deeper psychological study, focusing on the interiority of fear and subjective memory.

Heavily inspired by Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon and Stan Brakhage’s Anticipation of the Night, I drew on their use of sound and shadow to construct a liminal, uneasy atmosphere. I used handheld cinematography and ambient audio recordings—such as night walks and train rides—to mirror the dissonance between reality and perception. Projections of archival footage from my own past, layered and distorted, serve to evoke fragmented memory and the unreliability of self-perception.

Judith Butler’s theory of performativity shaped how I portrayed the protagonist—or the “Focus”—not as a fully formed character but as someone continually constructing and reconstructing themselves for an imagined observer. Through framing, sound design, and subtle gestures, I aimed to position the audience within the perspective of this unknown “watcher,” inviting them to experience the performative loop of anxiety, memory, and surveillance without clear resolution or origin.


This film is produced as part of Experimental Cinema Module.