Ghost and Me (2020)

Experimental, Animation, Short

A surreal animated short about the path to recovery. Through Rorschach-like images, it explores how trauma affects our minds and bodies, how we reconcile the past with the future, and the fraught role coping mechanisms play in our healing.

While Ghost and Me is a purely visual and auditory work, it was originally generated using verbatim text. For this project, I interviewed people recovering from eating disorders, taking excerpts from their interviews to create a poem-like "script." Animator Lauren Kerr and I then used this script to depict the inner conflict, trauma and hope that the anonymous interviewees described. What remains is a "ghost" of those interviews — a visual and auditory depiction of their journey to recovery.

Ghost and Me has screened with Blackbird Film Festival (2021), VASTLAB Experimental (2021), Extremely Shorts Festival (2021), LA Underground Film Forum (2021), SPLICE Film Fest (2021), Vinilonga Int. Short Film Festival (2021), Screener Short Films (2021), and was part of a public installation in Belgium with the Brussels Independent Film Festival.