A reclusive painter orbits a magnetic stranger across one summer night in New York City, desire compounding beneath the surface — until dawn, when he retreats into an idealized dreamscape where wanting is safer than having.
SILAS, 20, moves through the world like someone who has chosen his own distance. His apartment is grayscale. His routines are armor. But, inside his mind is a vivid dreamscape — an astral realm of glittering, faceless bodies orbiting in darkness, always approaching, never arriving. This is where he is most alive. This is also where he is most trapped.
On a summer night in the Lower East Side, a nomadic photographer named MATTO walks into his orbit. The encounter is quiet, charged, and never named — a curiosity that runs just past what either of them will acknowledge.
The real world and the interior world begin to bleed into each other. Silas’s imagination rewrites every glance, every almost-touch into something larger than it was. By the time Silas is alone again, he gets lost in the dreamscape. Suspended in the almost, the controlled sublime of desire without risk, and the silence it leaves behind.
WANING is a proof of concept short film for the feature screenplay LIMERENCE, written and directed by JERUMAI. The short isolates Act I of the feature into a complete, self-contained narrative arc while establishing the visual language, color system, dreamscape grammar, and psychological world that the feature will expand.
The short is designed to function independently as a festival film while simultaneously demonstrating the feature’s visual ambition, tonal register, and commercial viability to potential producers and financiers.
LIMERENCE began as an attempt to articulate something I couldn’t name — that specific psychological state of wanting something so completely that the desire becomes more real than the thing itself. The obsession that reshapes you. The fixation that turns out to be a mirror.
I wanted to make a film that understood queerness not as a declaration, but as a process. The confusion, the projection, the way lust arrives before logic. This is not a story of coming out, but a story of coming undone. And in the undoing, Silas finds the first honest version of himself he’s ever built.
Visually, I was drawn to the logic of containment. To watching through doorframes. To color as emotional articulation rather than decoration. To the idea that the interior life is operatic, astral, overwhelming — while the exterior reads as perfectly still.
Every character in WANING carries a color palette that governs how the camera treats them — in lighting, costume, and production design. Color is not decoration. It is the film’s emotional grammar.
We watch Silas primarily from a distance. Through doorframes, behind glass, around corners. The camera is rarely given full access. All apartment sequences are locked off, static, voyeuristic. The camera does not respond to Silas, it simply watches.
The astral plane sequences operate under entirely different grammar. Bodies in fragments, never full figures. Skin catches light metallic stardust. Violet and amber light across skin at extreme angles. The dreamscape has its own physics.
The camera goes handheld for the first and only time when Silas steps onto the dance floor. The loss of the locked-off grammar is the visual expression of his armor coming down. When he retreats, the camera locks again.
The slow push-in is the film’s dominant camera movement. It reigns in the dreamscape, the patio, and the floor conversation. Each push-in is the camera being drawn toward something it cannot stop approaching.
Transitions between reality and the dreamscape are match cuts. A shape or movement in one world rhymes with a shape or movement in the other. The cut feels like continuity, not interruption.
A child prodigy turned reclusive artist. Technically brilliant and emotionally sealed. His apartment is grayscale. His routines are precise. He dresses like armor — considered, corrected, adjusted. He is beautiful in the way that statues are beautiful: perceived from a distance, never approached.
Silas moves through the world with hypervigilance dressed as composure. He sketches people compulsively trying to pin down the thing that flickers under their surfaces, because he cannot look directly at the equivalent thing in himself.
His freeze is involuntary. His armor is the most beautiful thing about him and the thing most likely to destroy him.
Casting: requires genuine physical stillness and the ability to carry silence for extended periods. Training in physical theater or dance is a strong advantage.
Born in New York, raised between Italy, Barcelona, Amsterdam. He moves like water through a crowd. Never announcing himself, never claiming territory. He photographs not to document but to be present inside the moment of observing.
Matto is warm in a way that feels dangerous to someone like Silas: instinctual, unguarded, unafraid of what things mean. He offers presence, but never promises. He does not know how to stay, and he doesn’t know that this is its own kind of wound.
Warm light follows him perceptibly. He is curious about Silas in the way he is curious about everything: openly, without agenda, which is his most destabilizing aspect.
Seymour has occupied the center of Silas’s emotional world for years. She understands him in the way that only someone built from the same damage can. Where Silas represses, she performs. Where he seals, she floods.
She sees Matto the instant he appears and knows what it means. Her response is not malice — it is fear dressed as menace. She destabilizes, provokes, escalates. She is not wrong about what Silas is running from. She is only wrong to think she’s different.
Her presence in the frame is always an intrusion.
The social catalyst. Warm, performative, the engine of the night. He moves through the patio like the space belongs to him because it does.
The connector. He brings Matto into the night. His presence is easy, social, uncomplicated. A useful contrast to the charged atmosphere between Silas and Matto.
The Polaroid moment. He photographs Silas at the wall, catching the exact instant Matto walks into his eyeline. A minor role with a structural function: he is the film’s first witness.
JERUMAI is a New York-based writer, director, and visual artist. A recent graduate of Fordham University (BFA, Visual Arts — Film/Video), his practice spans film, photography, poetry, and painting, with film as the primary medium.
His work consistently engages queer identity, limerence, obsession, and the interior states that precede resolution. WANING is his debut narrative short film — the direct extension of a body of work that has always circled this subject, finally rendered at the scale it requires.
Production plan, budget, locations, and crew details are available to attached collaborators.
Blue hour exterior. Location scouted. Can be shot at blue hour, after dark, or day-for-night depending on scheduling and the DP’s recommendation.
A dark venue with the right practical light infrastructure. Ideally a real club shot during off-hours or a closed night. Needs strong low-light character and enough ceiling height for the LED rig.
Freeway sequence. Camera mounted externally plus handheld interior. Requires picture car and a driving route with appropriate night atmosphere.
A real apartment with strong architectural character. The bookshelf division between rooms is structurally important. Needs to feel lived-in and distinct from Silas’s space.
The most controlled environment. Grayscale palette — production design strips color from the space. Can be shot in a rental apartment or studio space.
Black drape studio, one day. Two LED panel rigs — blue-violet and amber. Standard New York studio rental $400–800/day. Can be scheduled independently of principal photography.
| Director | JERUMAI — attached |
| Director of Photography | Outreach in progress |
| Producer / Line Producer | TBD — following DP confirmation |
| Production Designer | TBD — essential hire |
| Costume Designer | TBD — character palettes require deliberate costuming |
| Sound Recordist | TBD |
| Editor | TBD |
| Colorist | TBD — critical hire |
| Composer / Sound Designer | TBD |
Note: Shooting on 16mm adds stock, processing, and scan costs — estimate $3,000–$5,000 depending on shooting ratio, factored into the production allocation above.
Inquiries, collaboration, and crew — reach out directly.