carmo - “The River, the Shore”

This cinematic music video attempts to extrapolate our current political trajectory onto an imagined London 8 years in the future. Here, the imperial boomerang has come home to roost. A culture of fascism, chauvinism, mass surveillance, and violent inequality have been left to run their course, leaving behind a compartmentalised, militarised, and deeply stratified husk of a world that could have been.

The character, invited to "meet the board" grapples with cognitive dissonance and guilt as they move from deprivation to the promise of affluence - whatever the cost. This social transition (or moral regression) is expressed through the character's passage across an emptied Baudelairian metropolis - moving from their squalid apartment unit, traversing the city's various thresholds and shifting fabric before arriving to the headquarters of the EFP - an unholy alliance of government and corporation that has gripped the country.

 A dialectic between the oppressed and their oppressors plays out in the grain of the city. Dereliction and radical graffiti counter the propagandistic newspapers, billboards and stark modern architecture. The full weight of the character's internal moral conflict surfaces as the film spirals into a nightmarish vision. Once the veil has been lifted, the protagonist is faced with a choice; to fight it, or become it.

No Generative AI was used in any way, at any stage for the creation of this work.