OPULENCE

The first part of the project is the visual element, a short film by Dahlia Bloomstone and Maya Baran. The second part of the project involves donating packages to multiple organizations.

The first part of the project, the visual element, is a short film entitled OPULENCE. This film investigates power, loneliness, isolation, escapism, money, mundanity, repetition, late capitalism, tunnels, manufacturing, shapeshifting, unnatural light, New York, Wall Street, labor, currency, maneuvering the self in a coded world, classism, hierarchies, ambiguity, and ambivalence – the things that move the world – all through the lens of sex work. This film explores what it means to experience the micro-interactions that occur when one is getting paid based on their ability to attract, keep, and become. OPULENCE deals with how stereotyping can become complicated when negotiating power and money, especially during the surreal realities of economic recession. How do we silence ourselves to get what we need from those that have more agency? Are these spaces that create microcosms of racism and identity politics mini-dystopias? In this film, there is an excess of everything, and there is no way to stop the progression. There is a specific and complicated use of language that exists not only around sex work spaces but also in corporate spaces, the character is trying to understand the vernacular of both. The character finds ways to lean into the labor and consumerism that alienates her, and she navigates through the hellish labyrinth that is late capitalism’s sexual commodifications in all its forms.