Breath
2015 · United States
Directed by Daniel Mercadante
Genres: essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, tender
A poetic montage, assembled over more than a year, that strings together all the different kinds of breaths we take across a lifetime — from a newborn's first gasp to a final exhale — as a meditation on the invisible life-force that animates us.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A year-long breath montage sounds like the most precious, navel-gazing premise imaginable—and somehow Mercadante weaponizes that softness into something genuinely unsettling, turning the most universal bodily function into an unstoppable memento mori.
The formal restraint here is exquisite: a single organizing principle—the breath—becomes a through-composed meditation that echoes the essay film tradition while refusing narrative, building instead a lineage of fragmentation that recalls both Stan Brakhage's material obsessions and contemporary experimental practice.
The decision to edit real human breaths—not music, not ambient sound, but the actual physiological rhythm of living—into visual rhythm is the hinge that makes this transcendent; everything else serves that one choice.
Reviews
A powerful short film... a poetic montage of all the different kinds of breaths we take during life.