BELLY BREATHING CREATURE
STILLS:
SYNOPSIS:
"Belly-Breathing Creature" is an experimental inquiry into how the body holds and resists nurture. Structured around five psycho-emotional cycles (Reach, Hold, Flinch, Loop, Release), this film is a fragmented study of tenderness, hypervigilance, fractured desire, and compulsive intellectualization. Using their kitten as proxy, the filmmaker traces the contours of trauma resurfacing through their ambivalence towards care. Oscillating between clinical insight and sensorial poetics, "Belly-Breathing Creature" charts a shifting terrain of healing without linearity or resolution, mirroring the looping logic of psychic repair.
DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT:
Belly Breathing Creature is my first (and possibly only) personal film. Its lines were assembled from a series of free-writing sessions that took place in 2025 as I recovered from spine surgery and a reality-distorting relationship. In the months spent healing, I learned to navigate not only a new threshold of physical pain, but the subtler ache of receiving a new kind of care. Once settled back in my studio apartment, I adopted a kitten named who further exposed my underlying ambivalence towards rest. The soft environment she cultivated with me was unsettling to a nervous system that had been primed for sudden change. I am no longer the person who made this film, but I have learned to hold that version of me with tenderness.