Upon misinterpreting a fact about gravity, a young man suddenly wonders whether he would fall to the ground faster than a loaf of bread or not. In this simple analogy of testing whether the body “means” any more than a loaf of bread, the protagonist of “Whole Wheat Man” enters into a question of whether humanity holds meaning at all. Like the existentialists and postmodernists trying for the past century, melon-balled and bleeding from their pens, to express this alarming, shattering, dissolving awareness of the relative significance of life, I hope his story—so naïve and simple, purposely wordless and imagistic in its medium—may arrive us at his discovery just as earnest and unprepared.

“Whole Wheat Man” was originally created in in Professor Pedro Cristiani’s fall 2015 Arts Workshop, “The Search for Cinematic Storytelling Identity” and was included in the 2016 Gallatin Arts Festival.