Earlier this year, we released an exclusive stream to former “25 New Face” Ian Clark’s MMXIII, which functioned as an experimental self-portrait, partially related through Clark’s Oregon environs. From the celestial-driven imagery of said film, Clark devised a sci-fi alien abduction follow-up, A Morning Light, that’s now sourcing funds on Kickstarter. Produced by fellow 25 New Faces Jim Cummings and Ben Wiessner of ornana, and starring filmmakers Zach Weintraub and Celia Rowlson-Hall, the film looks at a pair of estranged exes who experience inexplicable phenomena. For those interested in lush and aesthetic low-budget genre, it’s not a bad bet. Below, copied from the Kickstarter page, you can read why Clark is drawn to depicting the extraterrestrial.

My last project MMXIII often had me looking toward the sky—entranced by the colors, beauty, and subtleties I observed; it’s a captivating space, and one that’s always evolving. Throughout the production I developed a curiosity about celestial bodies, movements, and meaning.

Around this same time, I starting coming across public testimony by a range of individuals, including renowned figures such as the former Canadian Minister of Defense, Paul Hellyer, and Harvard psychiatrist Dr. John Mack. Hellyer maintains that the U.S. military has been in contact with a number of extraterrestrial groups since the late 1940s, while Mack—initially a skeptic—ultimately came to trust his clinical judgment over his understanding of reality, concluding that the abduction narratives described by his patients were real.

Related research nurtured my curiosity and I began to question why the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence was being dismissed by the scientific community, academia, and popular media.

I’ve always been interested in exploring our relationship to the natural world, and considering humanity’s damaging ecological impact, began to speculate how this might create a scenario prompting visitation.