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Wytai / The religious have written off the events of late 2019-2020 as the workings of a higher power, and the cruelly privileged have called it a necessary evil. Both of them are right solely about the immanence of our time.

We’ve seen fascists, eco-fascists, and corporations triple down on the game for power. We’ve seen societies collapse onto the people who helped build it and shatter everything around it. Hundreds of thousands have died an undignified death at the hands of violence and sheer apathy. We’re forced to snuff out our near-prophetic glimpses into the future and focus on more immediate worries at home, but this is simply the point of no return; the edge of the cliff; the bottom of the barrel. This collapse has been building up for over two decades; we’ve just chosen to look the other way. Or perhaps we’ve felt it wouldn’t affect us—I know I’ve pranced in those shoes myself.

The future we built on systems doomed to fail has inevitably failed. There is no return to normalcy, despite what profit-mongers, governments, and most importantly, corporations, try to tell you. Our collective intelligence is dealt a humongous disservice when we demarcate what success is, and then crown ourselves the winners. How fucking idiotic! How ridiculously lazy!

The future we build now depends on the lies we choose to tell ourselves. These lies may be the truth, but anybody content with where they are will brand us liars. It is simply not in their interest to entertain the possibility of change.

There is naught but hope, even where it is tough to find. Please allow me the well-worn analogy: Only in darkness can growth begin. This bond of light and dark is the same as of blackened rot and white mushrooms growing within, of darkness in the womb and light outside, and of rain-darkened arid soil wriggling with life.

I say this with that hope: that over time, we will change for the better, and stop peddling false ideals and find better ways to share the new truths we learn in the decades to come.

I also say this because every film I have written documents our time for a future in which we’ve undergone that change, or perhaps more selfishly, to be a warning against the maladies of our time. Either way, this future was meant to be in the next millennium or further.

The agony of seeing the acceleration to that future in less than a 100th of that time can only be described by pulling at the tenuous strings of nostalgia holding our collective comprehension together. And so I present to you Wytai.

Wytai documents the remnants of humanity as we know it, weeks after a mass exodus from Earth.