Shortlisted at both the Berlin and Locarno Film Festivals, Storage is a 12-minute psychological portrait of a boy on the cusp of something unknowable. Directed by Andree Ljutica, the film follows Marcus, a young introvert with obsessive-compulsive disorder, as he wanders the woods of his rural New York town and encounters a dying bird. Obsessed with violent video games, Marcus begins to question whether he may have had a hand in the creature's death, leading him to contemplate his newfound macabre power.
With a tone that is both surreal and restrained, the film explores the early contours of violence and the fragile architecture of a mind in formation. Shot with a painter’s eye for stillness and a documentarian’s sensitivity to interior states, Storage is less a coming-of-age story than a meditation on the quiet, formative moments that shape identity.
“Storage”
I’ve long been interested in the quiet formation of violence—how it arrives not with spectacle, but with suggestion. Storage is an attempt to observe that threshold: the subtle, ambiguous moment in a child’s life when empathy begins to fracture, or contort into something else.
Marcus, the boy at the center of this film, is not a sociopath. But he may one day become one. Or he may not. The uncertainty is the point. I was drawn to the tension between his obsessive rituals and his growing fascination with control—how death, when encountered directly, can distort a young mind preoccupied with simulated violence.
Set in rural New York and unfolding over a single afternoon, the film resists narrative closure. Instead, it lingers in the ambiguity of a child alone with his thoughts, his compulsions, and his burgeoning sense of power. The dying bird becomes less an inciting incident than a mirror—offering Marcus not trauma, but possibility.
Shot with a restrained visual language and a deliberately slowed rhythm, Storage is a meditation on psychic interiority. It proposes that before any pathology takes shape, there is a moment of stillness—of wondering, of watching—where something irreversible begins.
