Absolution - Best for Fests short film

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Absolution” is about addiction–suffering with it, trying to get rid of it, passing it on from one generation to the next. How do we deal with our problems? Who’s to blame? Are they ever really solved? 

The idea for the film came from a series of searching conversations I had with fellow producers  Andrew Shemin and Seth David Michell about these themes. (We’re all something of armchair philosophers.) I wrote the script with Seth in mind. The rest of our creative team brought the vision to life more vividly than I could have imagined. We had Shakespeareans on set design, engineers on sound, cinephiles on lighting. We filmed at an old convent five minutes from Penn Station in New York City, which had perfectly eerie props hiding in the basement. The circles aligned. We went for it. We discovered new layers to the philosophical questions along the way. 

As an intellectual historian, I’m fascinated by the stories behind our ideas. Where do our basic assumptions about the world come from? I see film as a way of playing out philosophy over time, exploring how certain ideas affect the human person, trying to figure out if those are the right ideas based on the stories they create over the long term. 

“Absolution” compresses about four centuries of philosophy into six and half minutes. It explores the downstream effects of certain modern ideas about freedom, knowledge, guilt, and selfhood that trace their roots back to philosophers like Francis Bacon, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Jean Paul Sartre, and others. What is the psychological reality these thinkers helped create? How do we, seeing the world through their ideas, think about addiction, guilt, and suffering? Where do we find relief? What happens to the modern person when the psychiatrist becomes the priest? 

“Absolution” wraps one person’s story into a journey through these questions. A man sees his psychiatrist for help with a difficult problem. Time, space, memory–the things that only look stable from the outside–become stretched and contorted  in strange ways as we go deeper into the person’s past, deeper into the ideas that gave rise to the present. We find light there, but also darkness. We leave, as the protagonist does, with mixed results.  

“Absolution” is less an answer than an attempt to unfold these questions, in all their significance and complexity, as we experience them today. If the result is somewhat mystifying, or even a tad disturbing, it’s not our fault. 

Lauren Spohn