Citizens of Absence

CITIZENS OF ABSENCE [Synopsis]

In a chillingly plausible future, a techno-fascist regime maintains control through the total erasure of dissent. When individuals vanish, their digital and physical footprints are wiped clean, leaving behind only their shadows, ghostly stains etched into the city’s concrete.

Those left behind are trapped in a state of “phantom grief,” mourning loved ones whose names and faces have been purged from their memories. They are haunted by the residual feeling of a presence that no longer exists.

The narrative follows Una, a young photographer struggling with her own fragmented past. Haunted by the void of someone she can no longer identify, she begins to document the cracks in this manufactured reality. As Una’s lens captures the anomalies left by the missing, it transforms into an unlikely tool of resistance. By piecing together these fractured memories, she begins to unravel a regime that controls the past to dictate the present.

Spanning 12 minutes and shifting between stark black-and-white and searing monochrome red, Citizens of Absence is a visual meditation on memory, surveillance, and the persistence of truth in an age of total digitization.
 
 
 
 

AUDIOVISUAL MOOD (Shot by Ganaël Dumreicher & Xavier Pawlowski):