The Air We Breathe
14mins / 2025 / UK
Logline
In a toxic world where clean air is sold like electricity, a disillusioned, grieving activist is forced to choose between her ideology and her humanity.
Synopsis
Scotland, the near future. Our air has become unbreathable, and oxygen is purchased just like electricity. Eliza, an activist-turned-cleaner overheard about a new, controversial air compound from oxygen-monopoliser Zephyr Industries.
Driven by the trauma of her past, she has to decide if she is to take the ultimate revenge on those that destroyed her life.
Director's Statement
Back in May 2021, when Zoë first pitched me the story of Eliza and the world of The Air We Breathe, my chest tightened and my breathing shallowed as I imagined Eliza running home out of breath in a toxic world. In my mind, the image merged with the news of hospitals oxygen shortages in Italy and India during the Covid Pandemic, I knew then that I have to tell this story.
In three years during the making of the film, our world had also edged closer and closer to the film, Nestle already siphoned creek beds dry to bottle millions gallons of spring water. You can already purchase compressed air canister online, winter smog from Delhi causes the death of about 10,500 people every year. Children in Iraq are already exposed to the carcinogenic gas flaring from BP’s Rumaila oil field.
It’s a time where it can often feel powerless to fight toward our oppressor and extreme violent actions can be seen like an easy solution to create change. The Air We Breathe is our attempt to respond to those trapped feelings of anger and frustration.
Underneath Eliza’s rage, lies layers of unfathomable grief toward her child and the people she had lost, toward the world and the planet, all of these I had experienced myself. I want to burn Eliza’s rage and grief into the retina of the audience, in the hope that the world won’t come to this and extreme violence action won’t be taken. There is still hope, in the seemingly hopeless world.
Writer's Statement
The Air We Breathe has never been a film about the future. It is a film about today. We already live in a world where people are charged for access to basic necessities, and where economic value takes precedence over life. In a world where polluted air shortens lifespans. In a world where it is too easy to say “I would help if I could” and then do nothing.
In 2012, when I was 19 years old, I had a layover in Beijing airport. I remember seeing the city sprawled in the distance, and being confused. Why were there two horizons above the city: one orange, one blue? It took a fellow traveller’s explanation for me to realise I was witnessing air pollution so intense it blocked out the sky.
Then, during lockdown, I discovered it was still possible to pay for Oxygen Therapy as a private wellness treatment. Meanwhile, hospitals worldwide were experiencing oxygen shortages which led to the deaths of Covid19 patients. As someone more eloquent than me has said, we might all be in the same storm, but we’re not in the same boat.
Like so many other people in my generation, I sometimes find myself paralysed with sheer rage about the system we live within. The urge to make a difference is always there, but so is the sense of futility, of powerlessness, of everything feeling so much bigger than us. The character of Eliza embodies that feeling. Through her, I wanted to ask where is the line between activism and terrorism, and to empathetically explore the psyche of a woman driven to extremes by the world around her. The story is about the delicate balance between nihilism and hope, and whether it’s possible for us to make a difference in the world without losing ourselves in the process.
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