LEATH: Life & Death is a symbolic short film now seeking funding. Support the project on Kickstarter:
LEATH: Life & Death is a gothic, symbolic short film exploring the liminal space between life, death, and time. Blending live-action footage, surreal 3D elements, and atmospheric photography, this dark fantasy project offers a poetic visual journey steeped in emotion and mystery.
Currently in pre-production, it will be shot on location in Ottawa, Canada. This campaign will help bring it to life through collaborative artistry, high-quality production, and deeply personal storytelling.
Currently in pre-production, it will be shot on location in Ottawa, Canada. This campaign will help bring it to life through collaborative artistry, high-quality production, and deeply personal storytelling.
Told without dialogue, LEATH follows a lone, ghost-like figure navigating dreamlike, decaying environments. Each space symbolizes a layer of existence: Past, Present, Future - Life, Death, and Time.
The story unfolds within the final moments of consciousness, the suspended state between life and death, when the brain may remain active for several minutes or more after the heart has stopped.
What echoes in that last breath of awareness? What memories return? What remains?
This short film imagines that liminal space as a symbolic journey through rooms of memory, emotion, and transformation. There are no words, only atmosphere, images, and movement.
Throughout the film, the protagonist drifts between natural and unnatural spaces: fog, roots, mirrors, water: caught between presence and absence.
A central symbol is the TREE: to me, a metaphor for the human experience:
Above the soil, we live and grow.
Below it, we decay and return.
The tree as a whole is time itself: life, death, and all that connects them.
The film begins with a sheet falling over a dead tree, like a veil over a body. This act is inspired by the way blankets are offered in moments of tragedy, a small comfort in the face of the unbearable. In LEATH, the shroud becomes more than a cover:
It becomes a guide into the afterlife, a soft farewell, a ritual, and a transformation.
It becomes a guide into the afterlife, a soft farewell, a ritual, and a transformation.
As the protagonist moves deeper into this space-between, she becomes part of something older and larger, no longer only a person, but a tree, a memory, a cycle.
LEATH is not a film about death.
It’s a film about what lingers right after, the silent heartbeat, the weightless minutes, the final vision of a soul returning to its ROOTS.
It’s a film about what lingers right after, the silent heartbeat, the weightless minutes, the final vision of a soul returning to its ROOTS.
Since I was a child, I’ve experienced the profound loss of loved ones, family members, animals, souls I felt deeply connected to.
Every time, I asked the same question:
Every time, I asked the same question:
How can the world keep moving forward, so unchanged, while mine has completely fallen apart?
Grief is strange like that, it suspends you. You exist in between, somewhere no one else can quite see, like a ghost in the wrong world.
LEATH: Life & Death was born from that in-between space.
It’s my way of making sense of loss through creation, transforming something invisible into a visual language.
It’s my way of making sense of loss through creation, transforming something invisible into a visual language.
This is not a film about death, but about what lingers right after: the suspended breath, the silent heartbeat, the fragile space between the final moment and everything it meant.
I want to create something that speaks to the quiet ache many of us carry.
A story told without words, where the imagery echoes things we often don’t know how to say.
I want to create something that speaks to the quiet ache many of us carry.
A story told without words, where the imagery echoes things we often don’t know how to say.
If you’ve ever felt that fracture... this film is for YOU.
INSPIRED BY:
Gothic & Dark Academia aesthetics
Symbolist paintings & Victorian photography
Films: Crimson Peak, Nosferatu (2024), Melancholia, Sleepy Hollow, The Witch, Penny Dreadful, Metropolis, The Lighthouse, Dead Poets Society
Directors: Guillermo del Toro, Robert Eggers, Christopher Nolan
Books: Frankenstein (Mary Shelley), The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde), Dracula (Bram Stoker), The Shepherd King Series (Rachel Gillig)
Artists: Nona Limmen, Esther Limones, Michael Ash Smith, Polina Washington
Expect rich contrasts (warm/cool), fog, water, decay, candles, symbolic objects, and immersive slow camera work, weaving together an atmosphere of mystery and emotional depth.