Writer/Director’s Bio:

Artist and director LILLETH, explores dreams, nightmares, queerness, embodied liberation, and ancestral healing rituals, through film, opera, dance, theatre, XR experiences, music, and community happenings. Lilleth’s live direction has been exhibited at venues including Lincoln Center, The Getty Museum, The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA LA, The Kitchen, Little Island, Center for Performance Research, and Berghain (Berlin). On film, Lilleth choreographed and co-created Every Step is a Prayer (NOWNESS.com), and co-directed Born With An Extra Rib (The Kitchen). In 2026, Lilleth will debut their first films: a surrealist, sci-fi dance short, Elixir, a live-action, VR horror short, Elevator, and a series of music videos and commercials. StudioLilleth.com

Director’s Statement

A hallucinogenic, queer sci-fi dance short, ELIXIR is a practicum in future-building — a call to resist fascism, nihilism, and environmental disaster; a plea for love, empathy, ritual, and imagination in the fight for liberation; a vision towards possibilities of repair and reconciliation.

When the fascist leaders of military planet NISER plot to tether farming planet UNDAN as their new moon, Undan revolutionary ALLUMINE travels to Niser disguised as a concubine to infiltrate the dreams of LYLA, daughter to Niser’s fascist leader, with Undan’s sacred psychoactive plant medicine. But as the Undan dream rituals draw Allumine deeper into Lyla’s mind, her growing affection threatens to unravel the mission entirely.

I first encountered visions of ELIXIR amidst a nightmare. In this dream, I found myself part of an artist commune who had abducted a fascist leader in the night. Through seduction and dance ritual, we attempted to incept an idea into him that might prevent his genocidal plot. I remember viscerally needing to return him to his bed before the night was over, so that he would remember everything as a dream. The ideas slowly becoming the world, characters, and rituals of ELIXIR.

For most of my career, I have directed and designed opera, theatre, immersive and XR experiences, dance, music, and community-based rituals—often beginning with images that arrive through dreams and nightmares. With enough film experience to recognize an emerging obsession, I began a three-year MFA at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts.

I began developing ELIXIR during my second year at USC and was humbled to receive the school’s Virtual Production Thesis Prize, which enabled me to film over half the movie on an LED volume. We have just completed the film with the support of more than 250 artists, and entirely without the use of AI-generated shots or pixels.

I brought this group of artists together around a shared belief in the urgency of this story: one that reflects back our violent and divided times, but does so through the lens of queer love and the possibility of ritual, repair, transformation, and reconciliation.

At the heart of the film is the queer love between Lyla and Allumine, who learn from one another a new kind of tenderness and humanity. Allumine must reconcile her feelings with her mission, while Lyla must look within herself at the violence within which she was raised. Their relationship asks whether transformation can begin not through domination, but through intimacy—whether truly seeing another person and taking accountability can interrupt the cycles of violence we inherit and perpetuate.

The Great Orbital Crossing at the heart of ELIXIR is inspired by the unusual orbital relationship between Saturn’s two moons, Janus and Epimetheus, who swap orbits every four years. This unique astronomical phenomenon became the foundation for the film’s fictional cosmology.

I developed a simple visual language to distinguish the worlds of the two planets: Undan is alive, wet, icy blue, and circular; Niser is deadly, dry, sandstone, and square. The dreamworld is black and white, while outer space holds all three. I wanted the texture of the film to feel archival rather than futuristic, as though these worlds might exist somewhere in a memory of the past rather than a projection of the future. I also utilize sound and music to propel the film forward, alongside a dynamic visual rhythm intended to gradually hypnotize the audience.

Ultimately, my aim is for ELIXIR is to leave audiences feeling not only the violence of our times, but also a small seed of possibility; and that the images, words, and sounds remain with the audience the way a dream remains after waking—vivid and specific, but also hazy, distorted, and impossible to fully explain. The goal for the film is to ignite questions, curiosities, and conversations about how we might move back into a right relationship with one another and with the land.