“This film is about the human pulse that keeps so many transgender people alive today—and about its strange resonances with the non-human. It moves across timescales much longer than the everyday. It lingers with the contemplation of death, asking us to imagine, if only partially, the vastness of time and space that surrounds a life, and that also surrounds this very moment of experience.

When you have been excluded from the category of “human,” when your belonging is pushed behind your species and beyond this era of hate, joy and desire can still be found in the midst
of darkness. The film listens for those moments: flashes of sweetness that emerge where they are not supposed to exist.

Life bites back. A force moves through everything like sap—running, sticky, connective. A living tissue that binds what appears separate. Places and times begin to touch one another; distinct entities brush up against each other in a kind of cosmic intimacy.

I want to recover forms of dissociation from the language of psychiatry. I want to resist its framing as only deficit or damage and instead ask how this disability might also be enabling—how it can become a method for sensing, for knowing, for discovering things about the world that remain inaccessible through normative perception.

I am trying to make a tactile, sensory film. Many of us who are trans have disconnected from our bodies in order to survive. This film is an invitation to be with the body, and to imagine figures beyond the trans woman defined primarily by threat and violence. The film also proposes a way of approaching the body: not to see passivity as something merely passive, but as a form of survival — a way of holding the body, of acknowledging its vitality and its capacity for connection. It explores the freeze response and dissociation not as fixed positions, but as states that can open possibilities, while also risking numbness, isolation, and separation.

The night club as a whale fall, these states can give rise to temporary communities that cannot form elsewhere. Freeze, dissociation, drifting away — these are not singular or static
conditions. They resemble ephemeral ecosystems: moments in which something unique, vital, and alive can emerge, even in the aftermath of threat. The body, in its vulnerability and survival, becomes a site for connection, emergence, and transformation.”