SYNOPSIS

"Some films aim to entertain—Moonlight Oracle aims to haunt. This speculative elegy resists narrative convention and cinematic comfort, drawing viewers into a dreamlike meditation on ecological consciousness amid planetary collapse."

​

Moonlight Oracle takes its name from the act of foretelling the future by supernatural means. Rather than relying on linear logic, this work invites insight through the cyclical rhythm of tides, the symbolic depths of the sea, and the mythic presence of the Whale. In this space, the ocean becomes a reflective and prophetic mirror—its waters holding knowledge, dreams, and ancestral memory within a fluid, living archive.

​

The film begins with whales and glowing moons in a magnetic orbit, then plunges into a creation story unfolding beneath the ocean’s surface. From the fiery emergence of magma from undersea volcanoes that shape the Earth’s crust to the vibrant ecosystems sustained by whale falls and hydrothermal vents, we witness life’s origins and continuities. Here, the ancient and the emergent intertwine—our oldest microbial ancestors nourishing future lineages, biodiversity thriving in darkness.

​

Moonlight Oracle immerses viewers in a multilayered exploration of the ocean as a site of profound contradiction. Atomic bomb testing annihilates ancient lifeforms. Commercial whaling contrasts starkly with sovereign, ancestral subsistence hunting practices. The whale’s form and movement echoes the silhouettes of military rockets, submarines, and corpses—its body mapped with the language of war. The sea is troubled by images of oil spills, capsizing boats of refugees, coral bleaching and glaciers calving signaling the death-dealing forces of imperialism, extraction, and climate collapse. Yet amid these cycles of violence, the ocean churns with suppressed histories—submerged knowledge and memory that resist erasure. Like the tides, the film flows and shifts; time collapses and expands, fast-forwarding, rewinding, elapsing. The soundtrack introduces a change in tone, offering sonic context for scenes that open to possibilities of healing that swirl in water, ceremony and ritual. Animations that turn water into galaxies mingle with visions of submerged civilizations, relics, goddesses, and spacecraft that mirror bioluminescent creatures.

​

Both sea and shore are charged with contradiction—sites of devastation and survival. In the flickering carousel of images, what emerges is a living archive: a repository of resistance and wisdom—human and more than human—that resurfaces, again and again. As the narrative crests, the oceans mirror a pre-death flashback. It is as if galaxies speak through the Whale’s realm, revealing our deep, cosmic entanglement. The beauty of Earth, provoked by the urgency of its crises, rises as both a reminder of our fragility and a call to protect her.