XENO: UNDERTOW is a three-minute experimental short film that employs stream-of-consciousness narration and AI-generated surreal visual art to explore the identity struggles and inner turmoil of cross-cultural migrants in mainstream society. Through metaphor, the film depicts a whale forcibly displaced from the boundless azure sea, cast into a desert of shifting sands. This imagery symbolizes not only the challenges cultural migrants face in adapting to dominant cultures but also the profound sense of identity loss and societal rejection encountered by cross-cultural outsiders in foreign lands.
The visual motifs in the film utilize unnameable fragments of unknown biological forms, whose ambiguous shapes reflect the fluidity and hybridity of identity. These abstract forms also highlight how mainstream society stigmatizes and “others” migrants and cultural outsiders. The AI-generated visuals intentionally disrupt conventional notions of time and space, blurring boundaries and creating a visually compelling experience imbued with tension and alienation.
The narrative unfolds through a first-person perspective: a whale, representing the “other,” seeks survival in a desert after its original habitat vanishes. The desert symbolizes the rigid norms and order of mainstream culture, while the whale’s struggle embodies the challenges faced by migrants in preserving their sense of self while navigating new cultural landscapes. As the whale attempts to integrate into mainstream society, its identity is eroded further, reinforcing its marginalization as an “anomaly.” Despite this, the whale clings to its memory of the sea—a memory that serves both as a longing for its past cultural identity and as an inner force of resistance against the engulfing sands. This memory, like an undercurrent, holds the potential to reshape the world it inhabits.