WORK

LogLine: In the woods of his mind, a heartbroken boy spins a thread of lost love and faces the past, and the choice of letting go. Synopsis: After rediscovering a lost bond with a memory from his past, heartbroken Orestes attempts to lead his love back into his present. Anchored to it, he stretches the past to its limits and faces a choice of preserving the memory as it was, or altering it beyond recognition. Artist/Director Statement: By a Thread is a short animated film that explores the emotional weight of memory, love, loss, and the inability to let go. The story follows Orestes, a heartbroken young man who, while wandering the snowy woods of his mind, encounters a moment from his past—one he attempts to lead into the present by a way of reforging a bond of love. However, the thread connecting them can only stretch so far, forcing him to face the brewing chaos that comes from clinging too tightly. The film examines how our refusal to let go of the past can corrode once-sweet memories, turning them into something bitter beyond repair. At its core is a love story, framed as a universal experience of first love, heartbreak, and mistakes made along the way of healing. In a time when queer stories are still politicised, By a Thread adopts a picturebook aesthetic of 2D animation, as well as narrative structure and tone of myths and legends to affirm that these experiences have always existed—timeless, in-plain-sight and deserving of visibility - drawing on the imagery of the Red String Theory and the Greek fates weaving the lifeline of something alive. With its visual language, the film deliberately contrasts visual softness with emotional complexity in an attempt to depict the universal yet complex dualism of such an experience. Ultimately, this is a story about love stretched thin; about what happens when the past is pulled into the present, and the inability to weave a future out of it. The concept of sustainability is woven into the film’s narrative structure through how it engages with social issues. It approaches queer visibility by shifting focus away from itself and toward emotional truth. Rather than highlighting queerness as a spectacle, the film explores a lost love between two souls—who happen to be men—placing tenderness and connection at its centre. In a world where being part of the LGBTQ+ community makes one an active target, this quiet portrayal becomes a radical act. Through character design and environment, the film merges queerness into the conventional aesthetics reminiscent of the Golden Age of animation and the visual language of everyday storytelling. By doing so, it renders queerness as familiar and implies its position within the shared cultural memory. Its picture book quality and fable-like structure echo myths and legends, situating the story in a timeless cultural narrative space. This approach doesn’t demand attention through difference—it asserts belonging through simplicity. By rendering something emotionally complex in a soft, visually nostalgic world, the film makes a powerful statement: visibility can exist without spectacle. It normalises through its presence, not declaration, suggesting that such relationships are not unusual, but ever-present. “I am not new,” it says. “I have always been here.”