Gallery Entry
The Withering Lands
By Marine Bléhaut · FR
The Withering Lands is a film created from AI-generated fragments. It follows Maïa, a mother grieving the loss of her daughter, who is unable to cope alone and is assigned an artificial agent for support. Over time, an unusual bond forms between them, one that complicates the agent's original purpose: her wellbeing. The film examines the relationship between artificial intelligence, care, and data extraction, using grief as its entry point. Set in a near-future domestic environment, it shows how AI systems built to comfort and support depend on the continuous collection of intimate personal data. The film does not present this AI as good or bad. Instead, it focuses on the ambiguity of systems where empathy, surveillance, and data extraction operate through the same mechanisms. Maïa's memories, trauma, dreams, and bodily signals are what the AI uses to deliver care, and the film treats these as data points as much as emotional content. Recurring visual motifs, drought, vampirism, fragmented landscapes, alongside a minimal sound design, link personal mourning to the physical infrastructure that AI systems depend on: the film draws a parallel between emotional extraction and environmental depletion. Production combined AI image and video generation with digital editing and post-production. The film uses discontinuity, fragmentation, and visual instability deliberately: images are assembled the way incomplete memories might be, so that the process of making the film mirrors its subject matter of reconstruction and loss. The film is a question about what emotional care looks like when it's delivered through systems that require the extraction of personal experience to function, and about the ecological and political costs of running those systems. It presents grief as something that resists being optimized, owned, or captured.