Application summary

A Mausoleum is a feature film project that explores grief through the intertwined languages of biotechnology, contemporary art, and ritual. At its centre is a queer Turkish artist living in New York who, after her father’s death, begins to imagine an unusual commemorative act: growing a steak from his preserved stem cells and serving it as part of a memorial meal. Around this unsettling gesture, the project asks how mourning might be reshaped in a world where body, memory, archive, and technology increasingly overlap. Developed during the residency as a screenplay, the project investigates grief not as closure, but as an ongoing, material, and relational process. Dust, hair, breath, and stored cells become carriers of memory, allowing mourning to move beyond monument and into questions of care, consent, inheritance, and transformation. The project is especially interested in the ethical and emotional dissonance between what is culturally accepted as “normal” meat consumption and what is perceived as transgressive when biotechnology and intimacy enter the frame. Thematically, A Mausoleum brings together feminist and queer approaches to care, the politics of meat, posthuman intimacy, and the possibility of non-predatory futures. It is situated at the intersection of arthouse cinema, speculative thought, and performance-based contemporary art. At the same time, its emotional core remains simple and widely accessible: a daughter trying to find a form for living with the dead. A Mausoleum was previously developed for the Sundance Screenwriters Lab, where it advanced past the first round but did not reach the final stage; having been produced under considerable time pressure, I now hope to use the residency to deepen and substantially strengthen the screenplay. During the Saari residency, I will focus on advancing the screenplay through rewriting, structural refinement, and dramaturgical development.