Into the Aftermath

Synopsis
Caught between a global pandemic that’s shut down New York City and Black Lives Matter protests clashing with police, Omar fruitlessly struggles to find a test kit for his wife, Carla. Meanwhile, Carla suspects that she’s been infected by the virus and she convinces Omar that if she’s going to die it’ll be on her own terms. Those terms include a fair amount of danger that they try and protect their daughter, Alexis from but Alexis insists on taking the risk.

Director – Vagabond Beaumont

Director’s Notes

INTO THE AFTERMATH was a paradigm-shifting film for me. It began as a prequel to a science fiction feature film project that i was writing called KALI… In KALI four young girls find that the future holds nothing for humanity and they decide to destroy the world using time travel and Artificial Intelligence to make sure that the future doesn’t come to pass… The film is named after KALI is the Hindu goddess of destruction…

In 2017 Ryuichi Sakamoto announced a short film competition for his latest album ‘asynch’, which he described as a soundtrack to an Andrei Tarkovsky film that didn’t exist… The film competition asked filmmakers to make a short film with one or two songs from ‘asynch’… The music inspired me to make a prequel to KALI… The idea as to why four little girls would want to destroy the world was something i hadn’t really explored fully in KALI and so i made a prequel that showed how one of these girls came to want to destroy the world… That film was called AFTERMATH: SEEDS OF ARMAGEDDON… We lost the contest… but we won because we got to use two really cool songs by Ryuichi Sakamoto in our film…

When the pandemic struck and the shutdown forced the city to go eerily quiet, the post-apocalyptic production value of a city like New York being emptied of humanity was too much of an opportunity to let pass unshot… As i lay struggling for my life at times with COVID19 (my girlfriend and i caught it in early March of 2020) the only thing i could think of was getting better enough to go out and shoot a prequel to AFTERMATH: SEEDS OF ARMAGEDDON… Yeah, a prequel to a prequel…

In AFTERMATH: SEEDS OF ARMAGEDDON, the lead character loses her father to illness, and with the pandemic raging and NYC shutdown my plan was to go back in time and show her losing her mother to the virus… The fact that she lost both her mother and father would be a strong reason for her to want to destroy the world in KALI…

COVID19 hit me and my girlfriend hard… There were nights when i woke up, suffocating from the build-up of mucus in my chest and i had to take long hot showers to dislodge it so that i could breathe… But i made it through in part because about 7 months before COVID19 struck my girlfriend had had brain surgery and although the surgery was successful the recovery was extremely difficult and she needed me… But this film was also a fever in my brain driving me to never give in…

When i got back on my feet i spoke to my coproducer about doing a prequel to AFTERMATH: SEED OF ARMAGEDDON, he said why another short film…? Why not make it a feature…? So we set out to do that… and in my usual unorthodox style i went out and started to shoot the city emptied of people and movement and energy and then placed my lead actor, Omar Villegas, in that emptied landscape and the film started to take shape in my head…

When the Black Lives Matter protests erupted a few weeks later we incorporated that development into the film and we went out into the streets and placed our actor into those protests… After a few weeks of shooting on and off, i began writing (my style of filmmaking is completely unorthodox and only beholden to the inspiration around me)…

We are continuing to shoot this pandemic-inspired feature but INTO THE AFTERMATH is a product of those early eerie paranoid days of the pandemic that led to those heady defiant days of BLM protests, wrapped in speculative fiction… A sci-fi film that like the best sci-fi has more to say about the present than it does about the future…