Themes
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”
Yeats supplies the epigraph; Pema Chödrön’s When Things Fall Apart supplies the reply: when a life collapses, grasping for control and explanation deepens the suffering, and the way through is to stay open to not knowing.
Rus is a man whose centre does not hold — work, mobility, memory, marriage, even his sense of time.
Real power doesn’t come from clinging to the illusion of control. It comes from learning to adapt to a world that will not hold still.
The hope on offer is not a promise that everything will be fine. It is one man, with more reason than anyone to dread what comes next, deciding to walk into it curious.
Personal Statement
TETHER began during the 2023 film strike, a couple of years after COVID, when we watched people we cared about disappear into conspiracy theories. At the same time, AI, robotics and automation stopped being distant ideas — they were arriving faster than any of us expected.
We were also going through immigration, building a life while feeling permanently at the mercy of systems we couldn’t influence. The world felt far less predictable than it had. Most people know that feeling now.
Around that time we read Pema Chödrön’s When Things Fall Apart. One idea stayed with us: instead of trying to control uncertainty or run from fear, lean into it with openness and compassion. It changed how we thought about our own lives and showed us what our film was actually about.
As film set designers we have spent years learning Unreal Engine, procedural workflows and AI tools, and we are genuinely optimistic about what these technologies make possible. Ironically, our first reaction was that TETHER was too dark. Then we realised we had misunderstood our own film. On the surface it is a conspiracy thriller. At its heart it asks a much older question: how do we live and thrive in a world we cannot control, but one so full of promise?
For us, hope isn’t believing everything will be fine. Hope is choosing curiosity over fear, believing that even in a future shaped by technologies we can barely imagine, our humanity still determines the outcome.
Audience, Scale & Producibility
Optimistic science fiction usually reaches people already excited about the future. TETHER is built for the ones who aren’t: the workers whose industries are ending, the people deciding whether the technology arriving in their town is something to welcome or something to fear. It gives them a protagonist who shares that fear, treated with respect rather than ridicule.
It thinks at a civilisational scale while staying a contained, performance-driven film. In the tradition of The Midwich Cuckoos, one small community becomes the laboratory for something enormous, and the audience senses the future taking shape just beyond the frame. Nobody experiences the largest transition in human history from orbit. They experience it from a garage, a kitchen table, a hospital corridor.
The feature itself would centre on live-action photography, real actors in real environments for the emotional core, integrated into the digitally developed world. We would return to British Columbia, where we have an established professional network across productions large and small. Hope, BC is a strong physical foundation for Eldridge, and a qualifying Canadian production could access federal and provincial incentives, putting financing on screen rather than into infrastructure.
The scale is civilisational, and the evidence is one family.