THIS WEEK’S FEATURED FILM PREMIERE: “Holy Afterbirth”

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Holy Afterbirth

Description

Holy Afterbirth is an experiment in absurdist horror. A person holds many versions inside themself. Religious and patriarchal ideals imbed arbitrary rules. The mind tries to make sense of pain through nightmare. Thoughts act as ghosts, haunting reality. Like memory, the film degrades, distorts, and reimagines a moment in time.

Interweaving live action, stop-motion and rotoscope animation, Holy Afterbirth captures the breakdown where divisions between real and imagined dissolve. At its heart, this mirrors the deconstruction and transformation in queer lives. Queer bodies are villainized by church and state, which are allied in the current nationalist regime. Yet, our bodies remain precious.

Runtime: 15 minutes

Director Biography - Alesandra Caroline (She/They) is a multidisciplinary filmmaker and visual artist whose work explores queer resistance through visceral, embodied performance and genre-defying storytelling. Their short film Holy Afterbirth is a fever dream of sanctity and defiance—a descent into the grotesque that uses horror as both weapon and mirror. Blending the sacred with the profane, the film confronts patriarchal oppression through exaggerated iconography, dark humor, and absurdist ritual, destabilizing certainty and inviting cathartic laughter in the face of dread.

Serving as writer, director, and lead actor, Caroline inhabits the work from the inside out. They edited and animated the film, and hand-sculpted its masks and props, constructing a tactile mythology where flesh and fantasy collide. Their practice embraces the handmade and the extreme, using humor not to soften darkness but to expose it—revealing oppression as monstrous while imagining queer liberation as unruly and defiantly alive.

Credits & Specifications:
Completion Date: June 2025
Production Budget: $1,500
Country of Filming: United States
Aspect Ratio: 16:9
Shooting Format: Digital