Delirious
in New York

She is not unlucky.

Mira has waited most of her life to see New York. She gets one day. She misses a train, finds the museum closed, loses a drawing, and watches her flight leave without her.

By nightfall she is certain the city has singled her out. On the plane home, she watches three strangers have the same kind of day and think nothing of it.

None of it is unusual. All of it is a Tuesday. But Mira begins to connect the events to one another, and somewhere between the closed station and the stalled taxi she stops experiencing a difficult day and starts authoring a persecution.

She is a storyteller working with poor material, and she is very good at it.

Nothing that happened to Mira changes. What changes is that she stops requiring it to mean something.

Aditi Bhandari

Director and art director. Cahn Studios, Seattle.

Seven years ago I went to New York for a weekend I had been imagining for most of my life, and almost everything went wrong. For a long time I described it as bad luck.

What changed was not the memory. It was noticing, years later, how ordinary every individual event had been. A missed train is not a sign. A closed ticket window is not a message. I had taken a series of unrelated inconveniences and built something out of them, and then carried the thing I built around for years and called it a bad weekend.

That is what this film is about. Not the day. The construction.

The idea that everything happens for a reason is comforting and I think it is also a way of avoiding something harder. Sometimes things simply happen. There is no plan underneath them and no lesson waiting at the end. What people do, and what I find remarkable about people, is that we make meaning anyway. Mira is not rescued because the universe finally justifies itself to her. She is released because she stops demanding that it does.

Fifteen years of looking at people.

Aditi Bhandari is a senior creative designer and art director based in Seattle, working across visual storytelling, brand systems, motion and editorial design.

With more than fifteen years across design, animation and motion, she sets artistic direction for complex narratives, translating abstract and future-facing ideas into clear, human visual systems for global brands, cultural institutions and emerging platforms.

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Alongside her professional practice she is a traditional artist. She teaches drawing and visual fundamentals at Seattle Art Circle, helping new artists build confidence in line, form and storytelling.

Outside of work she is drawn to history, human psychology, philosophy, and the quiet art of observing people. Those are the perspectives behind this film. Mira spends most of her day insisting on being its subject, and is only released when she becomes its observer.

Delirious in New York is her first AI native narrative short.

Credits

Specifications

Runtime

7 min 40 sec

Language

No dialogue

Country

United States

Format

Digital, AI generated

Ratio

2.39:1

Colour

Colour

All imagery was generated rather than photographed. Writing, structure, editorial, sound design and direction are the filmmaker's own. No generative likeness of any real or public person appears in the film, and all characters are original.