’Minds on Mute’ is a very powerful and intense short experimental video that tackles a really important aspect of life, also offering an insight into that horrific place where our minds refuse to go. Being an outcast may sound cool, and in our day and age it may have different meanings, but the real outcast portrayed by directors Lander Haverals and Annick Timmermans is the one that suffers alone surrounded by other sufferers.

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‘Minds on Mute’ contains a weird and complex cocktail of references that may be hard at first to fully understand, but will definitely come together after you figure out who Noah Harari and Emmanuel Levinas are, and how their works changed the perspectives of this world. Levinas has the great study dealing with “the trace of the other”, a great piece of postmodern philosophy that can be helpful in understanding the background of this short, and which can also be really useful for thinking outside the box in everyday life situations. Furthermore, it was hard for us not to link this short to Jonathan Bree’s music video ‘You’re so cool’ – a music video that is as well focused on the idea of identity as a fundamental value.

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Being in black and white, lacking words and other conventional sounds, this experimental redicts a dark future, the possibility none of us is willing to experience sometime soon. Lander Haverals and Annick Timmermans combined so many cultural references in this film and made it look like a performative/slam essay on life and death. At the same time, with the right dark music, this video could easily be transformed in one intense heavy metal music video everyone will fall in love with. The faceless human beings living in a grid is what metalheads would simply love... and die for. And when you go and check the relevance of every scene in particular, ’Minds on Mute’ can be the ultimate survival kit for the end of the world.

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Written by Vlad A. G