THE BINDING
2025–2026 / Release January 2027
A film built from a taxonomy of misfiring fireworks, following childlike spectral figures through the debris of inherited memory toward a language and future yet to form.
CREDITS
Concept and Direction: Jason Hendrik Hansma
Music: Forest Swords — Onward
Editing and Visual Effects: Jean-Baptiste Castel
Animation, Compositing and Rendering: gast.studio
35mm Film Production, Processing and Co-Grading: Haghefilm
Line Production Assistance and Research: Anastasia Troshkova
Visual Identity: Christophe Clarijs
Sound Design, Audio Treatment and Installation: Richard Burki
TECHNICAL INFORMATION
Production: 2025–2026
Release: January 2027
Duration: 5 min 38 sec
Format: 35mm with optical sound and Digital DCP, 4K scan
PARTNERS AND SUPPORT
Premiere Partners: Brutus and International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR)
Audio Partner: Genelec
Supported by: Mondriaan Fonds
Synopsis:
Built from a taxonomy of hundreds of scraped online firework clips, from misfires to stutters to unstable flickers. Part ghost-film, part speculative documentary, and part dream, the project casts the child as a newcomer, half-ghost and half-prophet, moving through the debris of inherited memory and haunting the algorithm’s gaps, propelling us toward a future language yet to be formed. Constructed entirely from found footage and algorithmically pushed to expose its stutters as an archive of unstable light, the film’s editing draws on the visual vocabulary of a scrambling quasi-language, with syllables twitching in dead air and atomized into unrecognizable debris. These textures assemble into a haunting dreamscape where meaning oscillates, collapses into the dark, before sparking new futures.
With Hansma’s new film, the focus shifts decisively to a meditation on rupture and an unstable future: Where do we go when our inherited frameworks no longer hold? What happens when voice and self become dislocated, caught between human breath and inhuman patterns? And how might a future language arise from such instability?
The Binding began with a moment in the tomb chapels inside the Neues Museum, Berlin, when Hansma’s three-year-old son, surrounded by sarcophagi, told a seated museum guard bluntly: “I’m not a person—I’m a ghost.”
The statement became the conceptual hinge for the film: the child as an emissary from a world not yet fully named (or formed), a figure who carries ancestral memory into zones where language is still in liquid formation. This ‘future ghostliness’ is mirrored in the sound, where rhythm appears as dialogue, disembodied syllables, twisted beats, and flickering samples that never resolve. Drawing on Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt’s reflections on natality, history, and responsibility, The Binding considers how the past persists into the future as potential, how the newcomer carries possibility, and how the out-of-sync rhythm of repair ruptures the film plane itself, cracking open the surface to reveal what lies beneath.
Fireworks become an extended metaphor for the dynamic: sparks that escape choreography and intent. Bursts and movement become a moment of emergence, an unstable constellation where the future is briefly illuminated, where both space and face are momentarily lit and made visible in the darkness.
The images and clips become stranded between intention and malfunction, both expressively hollow yet full of life, touching on a brokenness, where attempts at digital repair over the course of the film begin to break themselves apart. The images begin to hallucinate and haunt their own spaces before being transferred to 35mm film, then rescanned for digital installation works. Forest Swords’ track Onward acts as a sonic spine to the light: fragments of larger, disassembled systems that hint at meaning while resisting full capture.
The Binding sits between cinema, sound essay, music video, and speculative documentary. Rather than offering narrative resolutions, it traces the fragile conditions under which new forms of meaning might arise, and how repair itself can become a form of violence. It is a film form of emergence: ghostly futures glimpsed through the flicker, jitter, and shimmer, where the child, standing at the threshold of all that is possible, becomes luminous and demands not to be forgotten in the past, present, and future.
