Always approaching. Never arriving.
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 is. By the time he is alone again, he gets lost in the dreamscape — suspended in the almost, the controlled sublime of wanting without risk.
We’re raising $40,000 — fiscally sponsored by Fractured Atlas. Your contribution is tax-deductible and goes directly to production.
WANING is a proof of concept short film for the feature screenplay LIMERENCE, written and directed by JERUMAI. 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.
Two producers are currently attached. The project has received fiscal sponsorship through Fractured Atlas. Festival targets include Sundance, SXSW, Outfest, and NewFest.
Behind the scenes, visual references, casting calls, and production updates — follow along as the film takes shape.
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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.
Thematic PillarsThis film lives in the charged half-second before things happen. The pauses, the almost-touches. The question is not whether the thing will happen, but what it costs to stay in the suspended state of wanting it.
To be seen is the thing Silas most wants and most fears. He watches everyone. No one fully sees him. Until Matto does. The film’s grammar is the grammar of his own self-concealment.
Silas does not fall in love with Matto. He falls in love with the version of Matto he constructs. The danger is that Silas knows this and keeps going anyway.
Every element of Silas’s life is precisely managed because to be unmanaged is to be exposed. His routines are armor. His aesthetic is armor. His art is armor.
There is no explicit acknowledgement of defining sexuality with a label. There is only individual desire, evolving, finding its shape through experience rather than language.
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.
Indigo / Violet
Silas
Containment. Interior life. The controlled sublime. His apartment is near-grayscale — the only permitted color is a plasma bulb pulsing blue-violet on his bedside table.
Amber / Gold
Matto
Warmth. Instinct. The freedom Silas craves. Matto carries his own weather — warm light follows him perceptibly, like he generates his own atmosphere.
Red
Seymour
Desire weaponized. Performance. Danger. Her red enters frames uninvited, disrupting the indigo and amber dynamic.
Grayscale
The World
Reality before feeling enters it. Color bleeds in as the night progresses. The camera knows things the characters don’t.
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 like metallic stardust. Violet and amber light 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.
- The film lives in pauses. The anticipation matters more than the act.
- Restrained dialogue loaded with subtext. What is left unsaid carries the full weight.
- Dream sequences contrast with reality at first, then slowly bleed into it.
- Erotic tension expressed through proximity, not explicitness — the charged half-inch between bodies.
- Repetition of gestures, glances, and spatial compositions as emotional shorthand.
- No score during the most intimate moments. Only breath and ambient sound.
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.
Born in New York, raised between Italy, Barcelona, and 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 looking.
Matto is warm in a way that feels dangerous to someone like Silas: instinctual, unguarded, unafraid of what things mean. He offers presence, not promises.
He does not know how to stay, and he doesn’t know that this is its own kind of wound.
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.
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
Director / Writer · New YorkJERUMAI 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.