Blessed Are Those Who Grieve

Directed by Evgenia Chetvertkova, Zora Arose Ritz, Kayu Yeung

A collective experimental short / essay film—a fragment of a surreal inner landscape. Two performers torment themselves with immense sorrow in sand and slime, while a narrator from Hong Kong, speaking in a dreamlike monologue, attempts to rename a trauma that has been forced into forgetting. Through somatic exercises, the three creators explore the grief buried within their bodies. Gestures of grieving are captured through 3D scanning and transformed into digital copies so the two bodies become one, questioning how we can share our grief. In a third place beyond memory and reality, grief is born as a creature. Shaped by the embodied research of the creators, it transcends the digital/material realm, flesh, and language—transforming into a shared and liberated presence.