The Compliant City
Key art
Filed beside the screening
The picture is The Compliant City.
Scenario
2:57 · 16:9
A concrete hall holds canisters and colored pipes. The city has already been packed into them. Three tubes run the length of the glass: blue, red, and green, the only color the blocks outside are allowed. Grey towers fill the window. The window is the city. A man stands at a red cylinder. His hand is already on the glass. In the wet street far below, one figure waits, and the street agrees with the plan: no one else is out, and no one refuses.
The canisters tick as they hold their quiet. Colored liquid, if it is liquid, does not slosh. It keeps a level. The red tube is dull until a palm decides otherwise. Minutes pass as the man's hand warming the glass and as the figure below not shifting its feet. Rain on the street makes the paving dark. The blue tube and the green tube keep their own strength. He watches the red. He does not look away to the towers as if they might change first.
His palm warms the cylinder. The red tube brightens. For a moment the wet street takes a red sheen, and the figure below is edged in it. The blue and the green stay at their own strength. He could take his hand away. He does not. The sheen is thin, a skin on the wet, not a stain that sinks in. The figure does not step out of it and does not raise an arm against it. The pose stays the pose of someone standing where the plan said to stand.
The sheen leaves the street and returns to the tube. The figure below remains where it was. The towers do not change their grey. His hand stays on the glass. A bead runs down the inside of the cylinder, slow, and stops at a seam. The red, having brightened, dims one shade and holds that lesser brightness, still more than it was before his palm. The bead does not fall farther. The return of the sheen follows the warming and does not become a second visit to the street.
The three colors keep to their pipes. The canisters keep their quiet. On the wet street, one figure stands in the open, and nothing in the pose is a refusal. The bead stays at the seam. His palm does not lift, and the towers keep the grey the pipes have not been asked to change.
The red holds its lesser brightness under his hand. The figure below does not walk out of the plan. Rain keeps the street dark around that one body, and the blue and the green do not borrow the moment the red already spent.
Grey towers repeat in the wet of the window and not in the pipes. The man's sleeve darkens where his wrist meets the glass and he does not roll it back. Below, the single figure's coat takes the rain and does not take a color from the tubes once the sheen has gone. Canisters along the hall keep their levels. A pipe joint ticks and goes quiet. Nothing in the room reverses his palm. The street stays obedient in its emptiness except for that one body, and the body stays where the brightness visited and left.