PSAROKOKALO MAGAZINE, LIVE ACTION
THE GEOMETRY OF COLLAPSE
Inside Daniel Brandt and Anthony Dickenson’s 'Without Us' — Urban fate, algorithmic despair, and the fragile architecture of eco-anxiety in a modern, restless Athens.
“We aren’t really interested in explaining climate change. We’re interested in what it feels like to grow up underneath it.”
In an era saturated with constant warnings about the end of the world as we know it, with anti-environmental politics gaining ground and corporations overshadowing governments, Without Us steps in to give a distinct cinematic voice. The film follows a radicalized taxi driver, Gaia, who shares her ideas online and develops an unexpected bond with 13-year-old Alethia, a regular passenger deeply influenced by her videos. It is a deeply personal work for its creators, combining the climate crisis with the structure of a Greek tragedy and the journey of a lonely figure toward empathy.
Behind this distinct cinematic vision stand two creators with multidisciplinary backgrounds:
Daniel Brandt : Composer and director, graduate of the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne. He founded the electroacoustic project Brandt Brauer Frick, performing globally at venues like Berghain, Coachella, and Lincoln Center, while releasing acclaimed solo albums and directing interactive videos and immersive audiovisual installations (such as the Multi Faith Prayer Room at Art Basel Miami).
Anthony Dickenson: Director, cinematographer, and visual artist with over 20 years of experience in short films, music videos, and commercials for clients like the BBC, WWF, Amnesty International, Nike, and Lexus. His work focuses on environmental issues, combining cinematic techniques with an experimental edge.
er of isolation, and what it truly means to step into the "wild."
On Modern Tragedy & Eco-Anxiety
You describe the film as approaching the climate crisis "in the style of a Greek tragedy." How does the classic framework of fate, hubris, and catharsis translate into a modern urban landscape filled with screens, social media, and taxis?
Anthony Dickenson: I think the connection to Greek tragedy is really about inevitability. We know what is happening to the climate, we understand our part in it, and yet we seem strangely unable to change course. There’s something inherently tragic in that.
The contemporary world of the film, the screens, phones, social media, taxis and the city itself, is a world where we’re incredibly connected technologically but increasingly disconnected from each other and from the physical world around us. Gaia is surrounded by information about what is happening, but that abundance of information doesn’t necessarily give her agency. In some ways it does the opposite. It feeds the feeling of powerlessness.
So those ideas of fate and hubris felt very contemporary to us. The catharsis isn’t necessarily about offering a resolution. It’s more about recognition. We can see where this might be heading, and the uncomfortable part is recognising that we’re already part of the system taking us there.
The film examines how loneliness and social/economic isolation pave the way for radicalization both for Gaia and, by extension, 13-year-old Alethia. What do you believe is the digital algorithm's responsibility toward the despair of the younger generation?
A.D. : If somebody already feels isolated, frightened, or powerless, they’re incredibly susceptible to a system that continually gives them material that validates and amplifies those feelings. And the algorithm has no real moral understanding of where it’s taking someone. Yes, the people who design it may have a moral agenda, but its primary interest is to create more engagement and, in turn, more money.
“With Alethia, the frightening thing is that she represents a generation inheriting both the climate crisis and this digital architecture. She’s growing up inside a system that can identify vulnerability incredibly quickly and then feed it back to her.”
I think there has to be some responsibility attached to that. Engagement isn’t neutral. If a system learns that fear, anger or despair keeps a young person looking at a screen, then we have to take some responsibility for where that process can lead.
"Without Us" brings together two distinct creative worlds—Daniel’s deep roots in experimental music and soundscapes, and Anthony’s extensive background in visual media, art, and environmental filmmaking. How did this collaboration shape the directing process? Were there moments where the musical/experiential approach interacted or clashed with the pure visual storytelling?
A.D. : Daniel had already written the film with Anorak, the production company, and then he brought me on board. We already had a working relationship because he’d often made music for my short form work, so there was already a shared language between us and an understanding of each other’s instincts.
I’ve increasingly directed while operating the camera myself over the last few years. I really like being physically close to the actors and able to react to what’s happening in front of me. There’s something about being right there and capturing a moment as it happens that I’ve always responded to.
It also gave Daniel and me quite a nice way of double teaming the direction. I could be very close to the performance through the camera, responding instinctively to what I was seeing, while Daniel was watching the monitors and could see the scene from a completely different perspective. He could then come in with notes or spot things that I might not have seen because I was so immersed in the moment.
So rather than separating the visual side from the directing, it became quite fluid. Daniel naturally has an incredible sense of rhythm, atmosphere and sound, and I’m probably more instinctively visual, but we were both directing towards the same feeling. I think having those two perspectives, one right inside the scene and one able to stand slightly outside it, became a really useful way of working.ves, one right inside the scene and one able to stand slightly outside it, became a really useful way of working.
The Sound of Collapse
Daniel, as both composer and director, how did you approach the soundscape of Without Us in an era of environmental noise? Does sound act as a "shelter" or a tool of disorientation within the film?
Daniel Brandt : I wasn't scoring a finished film, I was building both at once, and a lot of the writing followed the music rather than the other way round. Which is also why the live version worked. The film isn't illustrated by the concert, they're the same material arriving through different channels.
The funny thing was that when preparing the live version for Barbican in 2025 we were working from an edit of the film with much more scoring elements. When I removed the whole score so we could play the music live, I realised that most of the film works much better without any music and feels more graspable.
Also the sound design and the atmosphere of the city got more room to breathe. So we ended up removing quite a bit of score from the film in the end. While shooting the film, the sound recordist Stefanos Efthimiou was always capturing the city's grinding, endless noise with multiple microphones and also closely miced all electrical appliances that were visible in the scenes. We wanted the film to feel very electric and on the edge. The team at String and Tins really made use of this atmosphere and elevated it so everything became noisy and created an attritional atmosphere. This feeling was also part of the score which was based on drone recordings I made with a group of musicians a few years before.
A Tri-National Identity
The film is a coproduction between Germany, Greece, and the United Kingdom. How did this multi-national identity influence the film's aesthetic and rhythm? Did the presence of Greek collaborators or the local context play a role in its core creation?
A.D : Athens was incredibly important to the identity of the film. We wanted somewhere that felt raw and slightly unsettled, and Athens has this extraordinary quality of a city that feels as though it’s constantly going through some kind of transformation.
There’s obviously a connection to Greek tragedy, but we didn’t want to make that too literal.
Athens has layers of history everywhere, but it’s also chaotic, modern, political and visually quite brutal in places. You have heat, concrete, traffic, graffiti, screens, tourists and this incredible ancient landscape all existing on top of one another.
That gave the film a texture we couldn’t really have manufactured somewhere else. The city isn’t just a backdrop. It feels slightly unstable and alive, which really suited Gaia’s state of mind and the sense that the world around these characters is changing faster than they can understand it.
Having Greek collaborators was also fundamental because they brought an understanding of the city that we simply couldn’t have arrived with. So although it’s a German, Greek and British production, Athens became the thing that really grounded the film physically.
The relationship between a radicalized taxi driver and a 13-year-old child balances on the thin line between tenderness and threat. How did you work with the cast (especially regarding the direction of the young lead) to capture this fragile, almost hypnotic dynamic?
A.D. : It was incredibly important that the relationship never became too easily defined. If Gaia simply feels threatening, you lose the tenderness, and if she feels completely safe, you lose the tension. We wanted both things to exist at the same time.
"Dangerous situations don’t necessarily announce themselves as dangerous. Sometimes they can feel exciting, comforting or strangely intimate, and that’s what makes the relationship between them unsettling."
A lot of that came from trying not to over direct the performances. Particularly with a young actor, I think there’s a danger in explaining all of the psychology behind every moment. We were much more interested in creating the situation and allowing the relationship to develop within it.
You characterize the film as a "cautionary tale for the next generation." In a world where climate disaster is frequently filmed either as dystopian sci-fi or sterile documentary, what do you consider to be the power of short fiction in awakening empathy?
A.D.: I’ve made a lot of environmental films over the years, and one of the difficulties is that we’re now incredibly familiar with the imagery and language of the climate crisis. We’ve seen the graphs, the fires, the floods, the melting ice. They’re obviously enormously important, but familiarity can also create a strange kind of distance.
Fiction gives you another way in.
With Without Us, we weren’t really interested in explaining climate change. We were interested in what it feels like to grow up underneath it. What does it do to someone’s sense of the future? What happens when that anxiety becomes mixed with loneliness, anger and the feeling that nobody is listening?
A short film can make those enormous subjects very small and very human. Instead of asking an audience to comprehend the climate crisis as this vast global abstraction, you can ask them to spend a little time with one person.
And I think empathy often begins there. A cautionary tale doesn’t necessarily have to tell you what to think or what to do. Sometimes it can just show you a possible trajectory and leave you with the uncomfortable feeling that we’re already somewhere along it.
Author Soultana Koumoutsi