FROM WRITER-DIRECTOR
MEHDI AKBAR
BEHOLD,
A PALE HOUSE
TRANSCEND THE TRUTH
THE STORY
KENZA is a grad student, trying to find direction in life, who becomes concerned when, on a visit back to her childhood home, she finds her mother JILL becoming entranced by an online movement called THE HIGH MANIFOLD.
There’s pre-existing tension between KENZA and JILL, and JILL’s newfound obsession with this esoteric belief system butts heads with KENZA’s political activism, but KENZA tries to look past it, hoping it would help JILL cope with the loss of KENZA’s father.
However, when JILL starts to pull in KENZA’s younger sister TISH, KENZA must decide, for the sake of the family, how to confront her mother, before things become out of control…assuming they haven’t already…
RELEVANCE & RESONANCE
BEHOLD, A PALE HOUSE confronts the audience with pressing and relevant questions of our present day: What do you do when someone you love lives in a reality separate from your own? How do you confront them, and is that even your responsibility?
The film is, in part, a warning. There is no denying that fascism is pressing threat to our democracy, and it’s ability to invade otherwise well adjusted families and communities is insidious. PALE HOUSE depicts, with clarity and incisiveness, the pipeline of spiritualism, to conspiracy, to full fascism.
However, the film is also meant to give voice to those who are affected by those who fall prey to fascism. Like KENZA, many Americans struggle to know what to do with their loved ones who have fallen down this rabbit hole, trying to pull them out without falling in themselves. And if she can find solace and resolution, even in the darkest of outcomes, perhaps the audience can as well.
The High Manifold is the ideology around which the story of BEHOLD, A PALE HOUSE orbits. Although fictional, it draws on a long history of spiritualist traditions turning to conspiracy in order to justify their existence on the fringe; and by that turn, conspiracy gives way to fascism.
The centralizing belief is that there is a higher dimensional force known as the ‘High Manifold’ that sends all the laws of nature and existence down to the 3rd dimension, and by aligning our ‘vectors’, we can live in accordance to those laws sent down by this intelligence.
THE HIGH MANIFOLD
CHARACTERS
