Origin Story

“From Obsession To Discovery”

It began with confusion, not the kind that comes from lacking direction, but the kind that arises when something powerful refuses to fit any known shape. 

David Cataraga, then only sixteen, set out in late 2024 to make a short film that explored emotional trauma and moral ambiguity. He was not aiming to change cinema. He simply wanted to tell the truth of a character who had suffered, but as he wrote, directed, and edited, he found himself in constant war with the grammar of existing genres.

The problem wasn’t the content. It was the structure. His character’s emotions weren’t functioning as backstory, they were rewriting causality. Events occurred not because of what had happened, but because of how the character had internalized what had happened. Memory refused to stay in the past. Chronology became irrelevant. Scenes rearranged themselves not for style, but because that’s how grief demanded they be felt. The film was starting to obey the logic of identity, not the logic of plot.

Cataraga didn’t intend to violate narrative rules, but the story itself refused to follow them. Traditional genres asked him to force a linear resolution, to detach the audience from the character’s perception, to make room for “objective clarity.” But the deeper he went, the more he understood: there was no objectivity inside this film. There was only perspective, consequence, and emotional gravity. He wasn’t manipulating time or form. He was recording a mind as it collapsed under its own weight.

What emerged was not abstraction. It was structural necessity. The film was never trying to be surreal, it was trying to be real from within. That realization changed everything. He was not bending the rules of storytelling for artistic flair. He was watching a system demand to be discovered.

Alone in his editing room, surrounded by unfinished drafts and cascading ideas, Cataraga began mapping what he later called “emotional architecture.” He didn’t know he was building a genre. He only knew that something had been unearthed, a skeleton of laws hiding beneath the surface of subjective filmmaking. The genre didn’t come from ambition or design. It came from confrontation with something no existing structure could hold.

And so, what started as a personal creative project became a forensic investigation. Not into what stories can say, but into how stories can be built when truth is no longer agreed upon.