Byron & Shelley: Illuminati Detectives

Emily Allan & Leah Hennessey
,
US
,
2021
,
DCP
,
34'

Byron & Shelley: Illuminati Detectives is a pilot episode for a TV series which imagines the Romantic poets Lord Byron and Percy Shelly as sex crazed, drug-addled undercover agents of a secret society dedicated to wiping out magic and superstition by any means necessary. The story takes place on the shores of Lake Geneva, which are gripped by a gothic mystery: has a local man been turned to stone by a Sapphic sex demon? Byron & Shelley is a weird story about parallel dimensions, the specter of bleeding-edge surveillance technology, the role of poetry in class warfare, and the limits of Enlightenment thinking at the end of the world.

Nosferasta: First Bite

Bayley Sweitzer & Adam Khalil
,
US
,
2021
,
DCP
,
33'

In an non-linear time warp spanning 500 years of colonial destruction, Nosferasta: First Bite sets the groundwork for the story of Oba, an immortal Rastafarian vampire, and Christopher Columbus, Oba’s original biter, who work together spreading the colonial infection throughout the “new world.” Glimpses of Oba’s early years as Columbus’ young protege are blended with present day scenes of a now mortal Oba as he confronts the imperial bureaucracy he once helped establish. This impressionistic blur poses questions of authorship, collaboration, and myth while also offering a glimmer of hope that perhaps it is possible to escape Babylon while still living inside of it.