Infinite Regress
Synopsis
Camila wakes in a bedroom in Bogotá. The voice in her ear tells her today will be the most important day of her life. It has said this before.
She is a senior operator at Lutece, a Colombian R&D firm whose technology sits at the centre of an escalating war between corporations, intelligence services and private military groups. She has been outfitted with the company's most classified asset — a process the script calls the Infinite Regress. Her mind exists across servers in undisclosed locations, transmitted back into her body through technology she will never see and will kill to defend. The process assesses every possibility within a given space and extracts the most probable, and the most dangerous, realities. Time, for her, no longer applies.
Across one operation she is sent to find a mole at the top of R&D. Each time she dies, the regress winds the moment back. Each time she lives, she carries less of herself across.
The film opens on a line about Velázquez, who past the age of fifty stopped painting definite things, and closes on Hegel: the ignorant man is not free, because what confronts him is an alien world on which he depends.
Structure
The short is a proof-of-concept drawn from a feature screenplay, which remains unproduced and open for production. The screenplay is built as a symphony of recursions: an overture, four movements that carry the operation forward, and four interludes — each titled after a videogame — in which time stops and the story returns to Alma, the painter Camila remembers. The interludes are the only place time still moves forward, and only because Camila is no longer in them.
Three naming systems run through the script. Gibson's cyberpunk — Wintermute, Kalinatek, Lutece. The codec voice of Kojima's games — codenames, and the Voice that briefs her. And the videogame chapter shells: High Charity, the Camila Core, interludes named for games. The same world carries into How the West Was Won.
Stills
Credits
Cast
Crew
The feature
A feature-length screenplay of Infinite Regress exists and is open for production. The short was made to prove the world, the register and the central device. Producers, financiers and collaborators who want to read it can write to press@ or hello@.