HIVE - Short film (16min)

HIVE is a dramedy short film about friendship, disillusionment, and finding one’s voice in a world already oversaturated with discourse. Inspired by Donald Glover’s Atlanta, the film weaves together realism, satire, and absurdist interruptions to tell the story of a single evening that slowly becomes an inner experience.
The film follows Maya, a young woman navigating an art world that fascinates and excludes her in equal measure. What begins lightly — her friends teasing her about her aphantasia, a low-grade feeling of being slightly out of step with everything — gradually unravels into something sharper. Over the course of the night, Maya moves from naive admiration to a clear-eyed disenchantment with the hollow codes and social posturing around her. The absurd apparition of an avatar imagined by her friends becomes the embodiment of everything she doesn’t dare say out loud.
Rather than a frontal critique, HIVE works through humor and displacement — dismantling the hierarchies of the art world without ever announcing that it’s doing so.
I wrote, directed, shot, edited, and designed the sound for this film, and worked closely with the cast throughout the process.