Collaborative Arts Research Initiative

The World Drops Dead is a feature-length narrative film comprised of two halves: one live-action, one animated. The two halves tell different, but complementary stories about young women experiencing tragic familial crises in their respective religious contexts—a contemporary Quaker community and an ancient Druidic clan. The two tales develop in supernatural and mystical directions, bringing both protagonists face-to-face with the eternal and the sublime. Upon completion, this project will screen at national and international film festivals en route to wider distribution.

The World Drops Dead is fundamentally concerned with the terrors and ecstasies of supernatural religious experience. Religious experiences occur at the nexus of ritual, dreams, and altered states of consciousness. In all cases, these experiences are moments of contact between a human and what typically lies beyond human comprehension: the voice of a deity, a vision of another world, a feeling of boundless eternity. Such experiences require individuals who are profoundly open to the ineffable.

I feel this radical openness is a response to the crisis of mortality. If death is immutable, then all that can be changed is one’s orientation toward it. Supernatural religious experience centers the sensual immediacy of another plane of existence or state of being, rendering death a gateway or a transformation rather than a conclusion. As an artist, I find the human capacity for these experiences endlessly complex, fascinating, and emotionally powerful. Both stories in The World Drops Dead focus on characters who wrestle with religious experiences as their crumbling earthly lives—scarred by death and mortal loss—leave them desperate for something beyond. Couched in the reflective interiority of modern Quaker theology and the visceral mysticism of ancient Druidic beliefs, the stories capture distinctive spiritual perspectives tested by grief and touched with transcendence. With the film, I aim to capture the anguish, mystery, and euphoria that manifest in these charged moments.