Italian independent filmmaker Angelo Giordano has launched a Kickstarter campaign for 'STAIRS 2: The Sunken', a surreal, minimalist short film shot in stark black and white that begins with a silence that refuses to resolve — a father calling his son and hearing nothing back.
The goal, Giordano says, is to protect the film’s minimalism and emotional weight without diluting it into explanation or spectacle. Crowdfunding, for him, is also a way to find the small group of people who recognize this kind of distance, whether they’ve stood on the side of the parent or the child.
'The Sunken' unfolds in liminal spaces — empty offices, silent streets — where reality slowly stops behaving like reality. The film pivots on a single impossible device: an elevator that doesn’t rise but sinks, like a diving bell, measuring its descent toward a depth where pressure becomes sound and silence becomes weight. It is not horror in the traditional sense; the dread comes from recognition — that the abyss isn’t death or madness, but the distance that grows when someone isn’t there and time keeps moving anyway.
The film’s most personal decision is its casting: the protagonist is played by Giordano’s own father. “I made it because the film is built on generational absence — on what is inherited without being spoken — and I needed a presence that wasn’t performed,” he says. “I’m not making a film about blame. I’m making a film about recognition — about arriving too late, and still choosing to look.”
Visually stripped down, 'The Sunken' carries its emotional movement through space, rhythm and sound design. As the elevator descends, the world compresses: metal complains, air feels heavier, silence becomes physical. Funds raised will go toward location access and permits, production design and practical effects, equipment, fair compensation for collaborators and — especially — post-production, where editing and sound design will carry the film’s emotional engine.
The campaign is live on Kickstarter.
