About The Film

The ghost of a soldier from the Trojan war travels through the ruins of a haunted ancient world to confront the rise of tyrants.

Authoritarianism has risen across the globe, and with it the cruelty and gross self-interest that corrupts reason, truth, and the ability of diverse people to deliberate about the common good. What might civic responsibility look like in an ancient, pre-democratic time?

In The Iliad the character of Thersites — the soldier who publicly challenged the motives of Agamemnon, the Greek commander at Troy, models the act of ethical protest. For Homer, this protest is dismissed, because it doesn’t square with the poet’s heroic theme. But later in history, philosophers like Hegel, see Thersites as a character who speaks truth to power.

Absent Now the Dead expands on this latter interpretation of Thersites’ courage to protest the loss of truth and ethics today. In The Iliad the mob backs their wealthy kings and oppressors when Odysseus beats Thersites to the ground, even though their own lives will be sacrificed to the greed of Agamemnon’s war. Today such men attempt to grind democracies to extinction, and if democracies fall, so does the struggle for a sustainable, humane world.

In this retelling Thersites knows his arguments may fail in his confrontation with history’s demagogues, but by showing the danger their contemporaries pose to us, he may achieve some instructive good.

— November 6th, 2024. The arc of history now bends away toward the abyss. But art and thought endure. Tyranny does not last forever.

Running time: 56 minutes

In Absent Now the Dead three threads intertwine: Thersites’ gaze, his first person account, and the ghostly music of the unseen world.

From a sound design perspective, these auditory ghosts open a path to antiquity. What is written in ancient texts infers the barkers at the markets, the forge’s hammer, and the clamor of humanity set against the natural world. Above it all floats the haunting voice of Thersites. Musically, the film utilizes ancient woodwinds — the various double reed and double piped instruments like the ancient Greek auloi – that float up from the past to accompany Thersites’ journey. These musical improvisations, based on ancient melodies and scales, are layered, combined, and constructed into motifs, with additional performances on flutes and triplepipe. Ancient fragments of vocal song, some in microtonal pitch, echo among the stones. Excerpts from the political comedy, The Knights, by Aristophanes, rumble with laughter in the ancient theater of Miletus.

— Hamilton Sterling