SET FOR RELEASE JANUARY 2027
Title: The Binding
Director: Jason Hendrik Hansma
Music: Forest Swords
Editing and VFX: Jean-Baptiste Castel
Film Treatment: Haghefilm
Production Assistant and Researcher: Anastasia Troshkova
Year of Production: 2025 – 2026 (Release 2027)
Run Time: 5:38
Format: 35mm and Digital DCP
Logline: An experimental film built from a taxonomy of misfiring fireworks, following child-like spectral figures that move through the debris of inherited memory toward a language as yet formed.
Synopsis:
Built from a taxonomy of hundreds of scraped online firework clips, from misfires, stutters, and unstable flickers, the film develops an emergent poetics through disembodied, synthetic vocal architectures. 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 gaps of the algorithm, propelling us toward a future language as yet 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, syllables twitching in dead air, and pop fragments atomized into unrecognizable debris. These textures assemble a haunting dreamscape in which meaning oscillates, collapsing into the dark, before emerging into a new future.
With this new film, there is a decisive turn toward a meditation on rupture, on the future after these works: Where do we go when our inherited frameworks no longer hold? What happens when the voice itself becomes dislocated, caught between human breath and inhuman pattern? And how might a future language arise from such instability?
The Binding was initiated by a moment in the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, in the Egyptian Museum and Papyrus Collection. When Hansma’s three-year-old son told a gallery attendant: “I’m not a person—I’m a ghost.”
The statement became a 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 gaps and rhythm appear not as dialogue, but as disembodied syllables, algorithmically twisted phonemes, and flickering samples that never resolve, a haunting.
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 (the child, the refugee, the migrant) carries both silence and possibility, how the out-of-sync rhythm of repair creates ruptures on the film plane.
Fireworks become an extended metaphor for the dynamic: sparks behave like fireflies, lights that escape choreography, and intent. Bursts and movement become a moment of emergence, an unstable constellation where the future briefly becomes perceptible, where the space and face are momentarily lit up and made visible.
The piece builds a porous world: ambient textures, rhythms dissolved into ghostly pulses, and synthetic quasi-images resemble language without inhabiting it. The images and clips become stranded between intention and malfunction, expressively hollow, touching in their brokenness, repaired over the course of the film. The images begin to hallucinate and haunt the digital space, before being transferred to 35mm film for festivals and then rescanned for digital installation works. The audio works as a sonic companion to the light: both fragments of larger, disassembled systems that hint at meaning while resisting full capture.
The Binding situates itself between cinema, sound essay, music videos and speculative documentary. Rather than presenting narrative resolution, it traces the fragile conditions under which new forms of meaning might arise. It is a film form of emergence: where ghostly futures are glimpsed through the flicker, how the voice begins, and how the child, standing at the threshold of the possible, becomes luminous.
