The experience of grief is a process of re-igniting connection, this is an experience my team felt coming out of lockdown in August 2021, each of us were going through slow recovery from a period of pain and longing. The body became an intimate surrounding, many unexperienced interactions becoming feverish vignettes in our dreamscapes – the source of which inspired a collective melancholy each of my group shared once re-emerging out of our homes.

Nature had become a more sentient setting, a recurring image many of us felt was the sensation of nature replacing our anatomy – which inspired our interest to create a film emphasizing the journey of connection through the elements of the body and soul.

When we first heard Gavin Higgins’ piece ‘Dacw ‘Nghariad I’ we were struck with a primordial nostalgia to a place which reminded our actors of their Nordic roots, which inspired the films’ aesthetical setting. We likened Keratin as a ‘spiritual-shamanic-sexual’ journey of assimilation, merging associations of the primordial, otherworldly, and mythological into a process of braided connection. We spoke of our characters like alchemical properties: bodies of atoms who through the struggle of their materials: flesh, hair, & milk would synthesize into a bond of elements.