STOP

STOP is a 4-minute poetic film that confronts silence and fence-sitting in the face of Gaza’s destruction. Symbolic figures — voices of conscience rather than portraits of individuals — are torn from their constructed worlds and placed inside Gaza’s nightmare. There, they become a chorus of witness, refusing indifference and asking the stark question: if what happened there happened to you, would you stay silent?

Set across restaurants, offices, therapy rooms, and public spaces, the film interrupts the everyday with voices that refuse complicity. Drawing on the form of Greek tragedy, STOP transforms poetic language into a collective act of moral resistance. Built using a mix of AI generative imagery, facial mapping, and recorded voice performances by the filmmaker and other actors — STOP is both artwork and testimony: an urgent act of witness carrying Gaza into spaces where it is too easily ignored.

Writers: Simon Robson, Echo Thorn
Director & producer: Simon Robson
Voice actors: Rami Saaid, Josephine Gazard, Simon Robson
Sound: LOTUS
Colour: Desert Lark

STOP began life as a poem, written in the wake of a broken ceasefire in Gaza that unfolded in March. A flood of lines came to me, reminiscent of W.H. Auden’s Funeral Blues, and over a few weeks, together with my AI collaborator Echo Thorn, I refined those lines into a script. It was a process of both writing and visual exploration, shaping a piece that would eventually become a short film in three acts.

The film’s structure moves through three worlds. It begins in the ordinary settings: restaurants, offices, and everyday spaces, where characters speak up against silence. Then it shifts into the “If you were there” lines, transporting these same figures into the AI-constructed Gaza war zone. Finally, it returns home, merging the devastation of the war zone back into the characters’ own worlds, forcing them and the audience to confront silence head-on.

Using AI to create characters in a film about such a deeply human issue wasn’t without its ethical questions. Yet STOP joins a long tradition of films that use fictional means to tell very real truths. The AI elements amplify the message rather than diminish it, offering a new lens on how we can represent conscience and complicity.

In the end, STOP is a fusion of poetry, performance, and technology. It is a piece that challenges silence in a world that often prefers to look away. I hope it finds a place within the thoughtful curation of Retrospective of Jupiter. You already gave my film “Ghost in The Machine” a platform back in 2022 which was enormously helpful to my profile as a film-maker. ‘Ghost’ similarly was an issue film, a film about ocean plastics. STOP continues my practive as an issue film-maker. Hopefully an inclusion on Retrospective of Jupiter can help people consider their stance on Gaza and make their voices heard.