Craig Quintero

Showcases the balance between desire and happiness, fantasy and the familiar, encouraging the audience to engage the sensations of the moment and embrace the uncertainty of the unknown.

In 1970, American futurist Alvin Toffler's iconic work Future Shock was published. One year later, a translation by Zhiwen Publishing House hit the market in Taiwan, thus introducing the writer's theories to readers of Chinese. The premise of the book can be summed up as: “A future that comes too quickly creates more apprehension than that of a foreign land. Future society will be stricken with a plethora of choices, throw-away society, information overload, and unethical technology.”

The Weight of Things explores this world of layers, these liminal spaces between heaven and hell, life and death, hope and despair. It is a visual testament of these pandemic times, of the invisible weights we bear. These weights of words and actions, unpursued dreams, the loss of loved ones—these burdens that bind us and hold us down, making it all too easy to forget the lightness of possibility. To not only be weighed down but to also become the weight…

The final chapter of Riverbed Theatre’s “Just for You” trilogy, which previously featured “All That Remains” (2022), presented at the Venice Film Festival, and “Over the Rainbow” (2023). The concluding short film follows in the footsteps of its predecessors, exploring our connection to the world around us, highlighting an environment with an animistic quality, while also blurring the boundary between seeing and being seen. “A Simple Silence” reflects on stillness without the weight of work, love, or death —a moment of pause.

Combining Riverbed’s three award-winning 360VR films (All That Remains, Over the Rainbow, and A Simple Silence) into a single experience, the Just for You Trilogy immerses the audience in a surreal meditation on memory, death, and desire.

We are comforted by facts, by the familiarity of things we know to be ‘true.’ The sun rises in the East. There are twenty-four hours in a day. I exist. These truisms simplify our lives, enable us to get through the process of living. We are not afraid to leap into the air, because we know we will land on the ground. So we get by, day by day, until that unexpected moment when we are overwhelmed by the whisper in our hearts as we are sitting in a bustling coffee shop or walking down a crowded sidewalk, or as we are lying in bed with a loved one, nestled together... Despite all of our knowing, we will never be known. All That Remains is a meditation on the fluid boundary between dream and reality, fear and desire. It is an invitation to see and be seen.