The Archivist
GENRES:
Mystery, Short
YEAR OF PRODUCTION:
August, 2025
LANGUAGE:
English
RUNTIME:
3,37 minutes
PRODUCTION / DISTRIBUTION:
A1GEN01 Labs 2025 | Ⓒ Jacek Kadaj
CAST:
When a squeaky plastic duck triggers reality to unravel, a restless traveler finds himself in a New York loft where centuries collide, memories collapse, and a mysterious Archivist decides what remains.
In The Archivist, a restless traveler named Ted stumbles into a surreal chain of events when he accidentally steps on a squeaky toy duck. His New York loft transforms into a stage where different eras flicker into existence — medieval chambers, Renaissance courts, Victorian salons, nightclubs, and futuristic rooms. Each visitor leaves behind an object, fragment by fragment building an impossible archive of memory. As reality collapses around him, Ted encounters the Archivist — the mysterious keeper who forces him to confront the truth that memory is not what we keep, but what we release.
The Threshold has been officially selected and honored at international film festivals.
Written, Directed and AI-Generated by Jacek Kadaj
Jacek Kadaj is a Warsaw-based filmmaker, photographer, and AI artist with over 30 years of experience in traditional cinema. Trained as a cinematographer, he has collaborated with National Geographic and Getty Images, earned numerous photography awards, and presented his work in international exhibitions. In recent years, he has embraced generative AI as a new creative lens, producing award-winning AI films that blend poetic imagery with emotional depth. His work seeks to explore whether technology can capture — and even amplify — the fragility, tension, and beauty of human stories.
Director's statement
The Archivist was born out of my fascination with memory — not as a static record, but as something fragile, theatrical, and constantly rewritten. I wanted to create a film where history is not presented as linear, but as a flicker of overlapping eras, collapsing into each other inside a single space. The choice of a squeaky plastic duck as the catalyst was deliberate: absurd, playful, and almost embarrassing in its simplicity. It felt important to ground this surreal journey in something so ordinary that it becomes uncanny. For me, the duck embodies the randomness of memory — how trivial moments, accidents, or objects can trigger entire worlds of meaning.
All characters and events in this film are fictional and AI-generated. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
