Sundance is the first major event of the yearly calendar for us, and it is fitting that we close the year with what is my favorite film from this year’s festival. A bizarre and distinct film for what has been a bizarre and distinct year, Forever by Mitch McGlocklin closes the book on 2021 with a heady, personal meditation on technology—its increasing dominance in our lives, and how it is shaping our understanding of them. 

Forever is not a documentary per se, but also not not one either. The premise is simple and its depiction spartan. Our protagonist (named Mitch, just like the filmmaker) receives a phone call from a life insurance agent saying that his application has been denied by the company’s A.I. algorithm. It has sucked in vast amounts of data about him and, as a result, found him too risky to insure. This spins Mitch into an existential crisis regarding what the A.I. “sees” about him that would cause it to be concerned. Only two characters show up—the voice of the life insurance agent denying his application (provided by our former colleague at Short of the Week, Jeanette Jeanenne) and Mitch, narrating a mental journey that McGlocklin admits is based on his personal experience.

The film is stark. Utilizing LiDAR, the same technology that powers self-driving cars, McGlocklin captures performance depth data via “point clouds” before porting that data into 3D software for further manipulation. The result is appealingly minimalistic—just dots in black space ultimately—but the imagery succeeds by being stylistically memorable and also, through its minimalism, sucking the audience into close attention, allowing the personal storytelling to provoke empathy.

With pieces that employ a unique visual conceit, you always hope that there is a deeper connection between the stylistic or technological approach and the film’s underlying themes. This is often not the case, but in Forever the connection is clear—the abstraction that LiDAR provides is a metaphor for the A.I. perspective, a way to visualize how a non-human intelligence sees the world through data. To McGlocklin it is exceedingly accurate, but it is not the same as you and I see the world, which leads to a host of philosophical questions—is the lack of resolution, the fine detail of life that the human perspective captures, mean that the A.I. is fundamentally lacking in important ways? Or is it precisely the opposite—that the extra detail obscures as much as it provides via cognitive biases and psychological heuristics so that the A.I. perspective is the deeper truth?

“It hit me kind of hard because I have a lot of belief in A.I.”

A less interesting film could devolve into a defensive diatribe against A.I. encroachment into our lives, and yet, via the film and in conversation with McGlocklin, it is clear that techno-pessimism is not the aim—McGlocklin’s technologist inclinations are too strong for that. A memorable line from the film describes that the application denial,“…hit me kind of hard because I have a lot of belief in A.I. I see A.I. as not really an opinion, it seems like Truth. I started to reflect about why this A.I. knew I was gonna die.” In the film’s conclusion McGlocklin pivots and this apparatus of mass surveillance that so many critics decry takes an interesting turn in his perspective towards an emerging techno-spiritualism that is both surprising and deeply moving.

LiDAR can be seen as gimmicky, but it is a cool tool to have in the filmmaker toolkit and falls under the umbrella of Volumetric Filmmaking. I, like many, first encountered volumetric filmmaking through VR storytelling, particularly the work of NYC-based studio Scatter and its seminal works—the 2015 VR documentary, Clouds and interactive followup, Blackout. Scatter takes credit for coining the term volumetric filmmaking, and these films capitalized on the creative potential of cheap, accessible, depth sensors in consumer products like Microsoft’s Xbox Kinect. Using the Kinect became a popular mini-trend for a while across all sorts of creative projects. 

LiDAR is different, and its use in Forever might end up a novelty. The equipment is specialized and expensive, most notably used at the moment in high-end drones and in the development of self-driving vehicles. Furthermore, current trends in volumetric capture are leading away from either approach. Most of the energy in the depth space is going towards high-end facilities that utilize photogrammetry, where huge arrays of cameras capture more life-like images and stitch them together—a cousin of sorts to both bullet time and current VR cinematography. We saw this in 2021 with Neill Blompkamp’s feature film Demonic, and it is increasingly utilized in special event installations and marketing. 

Whatever the future of depth data in filmmaking, what is key to understand about any filmmaking tool is that it is just that—a tool. The technology is not the point itself, and the success of Forever on the festival circuit and now online is contingent on the strength of its storytelling. McGlocklin is a gifted artist, but the film ultimately sings due to the remarkable degree with which he bares himself—his history, his emotions, his fears, and his ideas. While the use of LiDAR is a genius accompaniment to Forever it is ultimately the relatability of McGlocklin’s personal storytelling that makes Forever so deeply memorable and affecting. 

Forever is a film we reached out to out of Sundance and it proceeded to have a phenomenal festival run, featuring at Annecy and Telluride before coming to Vimeo this week. We’re ecstatic to be able to share this unique and personal film with you today, and look forward to new work from McGlocklin soon—the filmmaker tells us that his next piece is a film about memory and our digital identities, where he uses AI to generate images based on source images that he “un-deletes” from second-hand hard drives.