The Birth of Adom – Feminist Experimental Film by Sarnia de la Maré

The Birth of Adom – A Feminist Prelude to The Book of Immersion

In 2019, before The Book of Immersion had taken full shape, a short film flickered into being — The Birth of Adom. Six minutes of experimental cinema, spoken word, and orchestral-electronic music, it marked the first spark of an idea that would later grow into a full Immersion universe.

At its core, Adom is a parable for our times: a war-hungry world where poverty and politics collide, where rulers pacify citizens with drugs, and where the few who resist must rise against the machine.

🎶 The Soundtrack: Fauré Reimagined

The music was born from Gabriel Fauré’s mournful Élégie, but here it is fractured and rebuilt into Fugue on a Theme of Fauré by Tale Teller Club. A full orchestra swells — part electronic, part human — with the raw timbre of acoustic cello at its heart.

This collision of classical lament with modern sound design mirrors the film itself: grief transformed into rebellion, beauty colliding with rage.

✍️ The Spoken Word

The film’s poetry, written and performed by Sarnia de la Maré (iServalan), weaves images of corruption, violence, and sorrow:

“The earth learned the tune of a reckoning fugue”
“The rape of God’s children made death taste better than living”
“Her rage in hand, brave anger like a man’s, she walked the earth”

These words sit not as background, but as the pulse of the film — a prophetic voice that names what has been silenced.

🌑 The Birth of a Myth

From this landscape of ruin emerges Adom — not a saviour in white robes, but a figure of acid rain, tar, and wildfire. She is not born into peace, but into fury. Her mantra is simple:

Resist. Disrupt. Persist.

Adom is both heroine and warning, a feminist icon forged from violence who embodies the rage of the oppressed. She is not meek, nor merciful. She rises so that others may rise.

📚 A Place in Film & Art History

The Birth of Adom belongs to the lineage of feminist experimental cinema: the surreal montage of Maya Deren, the political urgency of 1970s animation, and the glitchy futurism of cyberpunk.

But it also speaks to cultural history:

The drugged complacency echoes both colonial exploitation (opium, sedation) and contemporary pharmaceutical anxieties.
The uprising reflects the cycles of protest and suppression across modern democracies.
The creation of Adom foreshadows the archetypes later explored in The Book of Immersion.

It is both myth and manifesto, a cinematic prayer for rebellion.

🌍 Why It Still Matters

In a world still wrestling with authoritarianism, surveillance, and the politics of sedation, The Birth of Adom reads less like a relic and more like a prophecy. It reminds us of the dangers of passivity and the necessity of anger.

Anger, here, is not destruction for its own sake — it is the only energy powerful enough to birth change.