Heaven is Nobody's

A boy journeys through a nightmarish city to find a cure for his mom, as a dancing curse descends on him and his home.

For “Heaven is Nobody’s”, I take inspiration from the strange real events that happened in Strasbourg in 1518, when a mass hysteria episode, manifesting as a dancing plague, took over the city for more than a month, putting up to 400 citizens in a state of trance. Learning about this event, its force inevitably caught me. This spiritual predisposition of a whole city to be cursed inspired a feature film idea I’m currently working on, "A Time to Dance". Afterward, the short film "Heaven is Nobody's" spun off from it as an exploratory proof of concept, but also as a standalone piece where I wanted to merge my visual experimentation in music videos with dramatic narrative, playing with the conventions of horror cinema. The story inhabits a world that only exists in our nightmares, with no way in or out. Even when everything and everyone tells us we’re going to fall, can we escape the fate that has been laid out for us? The hypersensorial soundscape and somber atmosphere are essential to the film. As the main aural element, a relentless deep techno beat acts as voice and ominous presence of the dancing curse that draws Narciso in, bringing us from the medieval into a desolate, alternate near future. I always envisioned this dark fable with a distinctly “cursed” look. Through exaggerated expressionistic lighting and perspectives, we move slow and heavy, pushing the characters in this tale toward an inescapable fate.