film

life without

LIFE WITHOUT is a crime thriller feature film about sisters who kill a man for revenge. When they then start to kill for money, their past comes back to wreak its own payback.

It has been selected for and won awards at a number of independent cinema festivals including:

Portugal Indie Film Festival (Best Thriller), Swedish International Film Festival (Best Midnight Film), Indian Independent Film Festival (Best Drama Thriller), Golden Reel Awards (Special Jury Award), Benelux International Film Festival (Outstanding Achievement), Stockholm City Film Festival (Finalist, Best Feature) plus Prague International Film Awards, New York International Film Festival and Brazil International Film Festival.

distribution darkside releasing

At the heart of LIFE WITHOUT is one of the most examined cinematic themes that of guilt. This good and evil story is wrapped up into the guilty and the wronged. this story has an incongruity within it that exists in life. There are things in this world that deeply resonate with us. Things that fascinate us and make us compelled to try and understand them. This is our evolutionary psychology, specifically, in our old brain where decisions are made instinctively. Because the old brain is a part of the brain that does not process language which allows for this cognitive persuasion. In fact, we seek incongruency out, and it holds our attention. Generally, people find meaning in their lives by constructing stories about themselves and so our obsession with people plays out most strongly in narrative, where conflicts between characters are ubiquitous. When we're told stories and learn about the lives of characters, our old brains react as though the characters are real people, and strangely we try to learn lessons from them.

In a school study, children who read stories without a description of mental states did better at a test of understanding the mental states of other people than children who read stories with such descriptions. The fascinating finding is that forcing your audience to make inferences themselves prepares them better for reasoning about the characters they see and hear.

A reason why we like narrative tales when we normally watch two people in conflict triggers our sense of loyalty and our sense of right and wrong. One of the foundations of moral psychology. People do align themselves in their minds with certain characters, and feel joy when they succeed and sorrow when they fail.

And we are satisfied with aspect of rules especially if our characters play fair. But at the same time characters, like life, always involves some kind of incongruity in the form of uncertainty. The reason we actually watch films is we naturally want to like people and we naturally like competition. We evolved as humans to enjoy the practice of things that resemble real world skills, such as fighting, hiding and escaping. There are things in this world that deeply resonate with us. We seek them out. They hold our attention. People feel moved by sad uplifting stories. The qualities that are common in this film and its characters are common to all of us. They are like a key that fits a lock with our psychological proclivities.