洄 Original

My graduation project 'The town' is a unique style of anti-utopian sci-fi short film about two small town girls who decide to have an adventure together after an accidental bonding and eventually discover the truth about the world they live in.
The two female protagonists have never met each other before. They live in the same town, where there is a system of bonding in which a person is raised by the government until he is twenty years old, and when he reaches the age of twenty he is "bonded" to a forty year old, and when his partner dies at the age of sixty, he is "bonded" to a twenty year old. At the end of his partner's life, at the age of sixty, he will "contract" with a twenty-year-old. As the souls of the two parties are identical, they become the closest of confidants. Moreover, people's souls are re-circulated to the newcomer after their death, so everyone in the town can have a confidant twice in their lives. There is also a system in the town where learning is facilitated by the fact that everyone has a brain-computer interface, thanks to the advanced technology that allows them to take virtual 'pills' for actions that require the use of the brain, such as learning. Both systems have their roots in the beautiful legend of the town's witch, whose patronage has allowed the town to rebuild itself from the ashes of a nuclear war with advanced technology and a happy system.
This cycle is broken by the appearance of Yu (female #1), a person born with "anencephaly", a condition that prevents her from learning and feeling through brain-computer interfaces like everyone else, and which allows her to see the world as others see it only through smart glasses; she is also unable to communicate with potential "soulmates" because of her autonomous learning. She was also unable to learn autonomously and was therefore unable to be indoctrinated with the same ideas as her potential "soulmates". When Yu turns twenty, Yu and Yu (the second female) become the lone couple at a meeting between two people. Yu is already hopeless at the idea of a union because of his own shortcomings, while Yu is wracked by grief at having just lost his older soulmate and anger at not having found a younger one, and the two decide to go into the witch's forbidden place to seek the truth. As soon as the witch appears, Yu shows his submissiveness to the witch and kneels before her to pray for the truth. Yu accidentally discovers the witch's plot while fiddling with the camera he carries - the witch will not tell them the truth, and the seemingly fairy-like witch's hall is full of mechanisms ready to kill them. In a fierce fight, Yu's brain machine is pulled out by Yu and she sees what the real world looks like. The witches are finally "destroyed" by the two of them, and the real world is revealed to everyone - it turns out that the witches and the colourful worlds in the brain machines are artificial electronic illusions, and when the central processor is destroyed, the virtual information attached to the whole town ceases to exist. The witch that had brought the town's well-being was only an artificial intelligence, and the witch's sanctuary housed the artificial intelligence's central processor and chips, while the soul cycle and the banning system were the artificial intelligence's last artificial order to "maintain the stability and unity of the town", which had deviated from the original purpose of humans. The soul cycle and the banning system were the result of the AI's misunderstanding of the original purpose of the town when it carried out its last artificial order to maintain stability and unity.
After this incident, Yu and Yu meet again at the witch's sanctuary. When the electronic illusion dissipated, the dark clouds above the witch's forbidden place disappeared and a long staircase appeared in the sky. After the last incident, the two have become the closest of friends - even though they do not share exactly the same soul. The two decide to explore again and together they climb the stairway before them. The long tube of the stairway strings together countless towns wrapped in a sphere, and it is unknown whether they have broken the cycle or entered a new one.