a short film by Shivani Hassard
Co-written and produced by Ben Gottlieb

Starring:
Mariana Newhard, Maya Lubinsky
Lucy McMichael, Morgan Sullivan & Julianna Kurokawa

DOP: Angelos Rompolis
Assistant Director: Brittany Nicole Northcross
Colourist: XAI
Sound Design: Ben Goodall
Graphics: Stefan Iyapah
Music: Shuze Lei Ren

View on Vimeo 

Streaming on Minute Shorts

Film synopsis:

Miffi writes from a place within herself, but she's not sure that's good enough. In a moment of self-doubt, she sees an advert for an AI writing tool that connects to your thoughts, intuitively generating content from your feelings and judgements. Faced with a deteriorating relationship, Miffi finds that ThoughtScribe does not discriminate between private and public thoughts while harvesting content. Soon she has to choose her loyalties. She regains that missing spark, but sparks also singe.

Akimbo 2024, Berlin Sci-Fi Festival (Best German Short Film), Grrl Haus Kino 2023, Signals Festival 2023

THOUGHTSCRIBE: ESSAY BY HAMZA BEG AND CRISTA SIGLIN

I DID IT FOR THE PLOT. I’d wager in a room full of creative people, a decent percentage of us can say this of one thing or another that we’ve done.

Shivani’s ThoughtScribe is a film that directly confronts not just the process of writing, but the entire process of narrativizing our lives — from how we conceptualize what happens to us, and what we do, all the way to what we write down on the page. In this ironically non-plot driven film, with a structurally and thematically queer center, what the artist does to place meaning upon the entropic ongoings of life and love is non-judgmentally probed.

This work also interrogates whether being closer than ever to your thoughts and internal processes necessitates emotional distance from other people. Does a story-ravenous curatorial voice force a cold, constant lens?

Artful, daring, odd, unsettling, uncanny, and both direct and indirect; Thoughtscribe opens windows, and looks at windows through windows. It recognizes and amplifies the confusion between I and self. Is the protagonist necessarily the narrator? The product serves as a metaphor for the meta voice and the observer we carry around in our heads.

Cinema has posed this question before, certainly with films like Synecdoche New York, Stranger Than Fiction, and Adaptation; but Shivani’s work, while realistic and maybe a bit grave at times, avoids the cynical tone of these other films. It is also sensitive to the particulars of our current moment, with a dystopian product that serves as a direct analysis of contemporary trends in AI development. Due to technology’s interventions in our day to day, our interpersonal relationships can be simultaneously more intimate and dissociative. What does this mean for intimacy?

Intertwining the stuff of life and artwork makes any relational chasm a creative opportunity, and too-easy conflict resolution becomes a failure of plot.

When we elect to blur our own boundaries — do we still have full awareness and agency about what motivates each action? Tapping into every crevice of every corner of the mind for creative work, Thoughtscribe provokes you to provoke specific actions to heighten the literary-ness of life — directly begging the question, Does art resemble life, or life, art?

Does the ThoughtScribe interface make the process of cherry picking life’s details for creative purposes inherently more extractive? Why is it nefarious when AI does this? Why is it about the beauty of perception and artistic vision when a human does it? Is that a bit hypocritical? There’s a great “This American Life” episode on the poetic consciousness of AI, by the way.

And speaking of poetic consciousness, the film’s got it. Flexing in an exquisite moment of spoken word, the head of a sparrow perks my ears and awakens an envy within me. And imagistically, the scene of the “Intruder,” a mysterious character (initially just a passerby) becomes a moment of visual stammer, echo, and conflation. When she enters the private space, she becomes part of the writer’s process, becomes part of the writer’s I, and enveloped into her multiplicity of self. Yet, by the end of the sequence she’s invisible, someone we cease to pay attention to — making her meaning a bit transactional as well.

Memory also plays a part in the work, with some moments projecting the present into the past, and others the past into the present (another consequence of narrativization). Attached to memory, there’s always the notion of loss, and losing access to previous moments with the same accuracy and clarity as before.

The somber and layered visual language of the film holds us with great care, and the ever-adjusting voice of Thoughtscribe keys our attention to its meditation on creation and relation — bringing now into the future, and the future into now.