Morgen and I wrote AOÍDĒ more than a decade ago, and then it sat on the shelf. Art films are hard to finance, and this is not one you shoot on a weekend, so there was no version of the traditional route that ended with it getting made. With the advent of AI filmmaking, I was finally able to tell this story.

As a filmmaker, I keep coming back to themes of reconciliation and salvation, in both a spiritual and temporal context, and this is that story. Hope can heal anyone but herself. She never asked for the gift; she has spent most of her life trying to forget she has it, and the museum she wakes up in is built out of everything she has been avoiding. The woman who gave her the gift. The father who left. The mother she could not save. The years she chose to feel nothing. Each painting is a door into one of those rooms.

Even though AOÍDĒ was completely AI-generated, I made it in the order a film usually gets made. Casting, locations, production design, wardrobe, props, etc., then the film itself, scene by scene. The main character, Hope, is carried from seven to thirty years old, and she had to be the same person at every age. I still had to block the scene, direct the actors, and decide the objective of the scene. None of that changed.

The challenge I kept coming back to was how to show what Hope's gift costs her without anyone saying it out loud. I used gold in the film, and it only shows up where her gift is being spent.

We assume the great sacrifice is to die for someone. What if the real sacrifice is to live?