Filmmaker Statement

L'amour rebelle is an opera born in NFT chatrooms, where animator Leo Crane met opera singer Merav Eldan and composer Zachary Whitney. Concerned that art in these circles was becoming defined by fast jpgs, they set out to bring a sense of tradition and evolution to the blockchain. Inspired by classic opera, they found parallels between Carmen's conflicted relationship with love and our own relationship with the runaway technology of web3. Leo translated the story into an animation, using traditional materials and hand-drawn, frame-by-frame techniques. Roy Joseph Butler modelled the figure of Carmen, rethinking traditional associations of gender, race, and sexuality to create a universal 21st-century figure. The visuals were set to Zach's new electroacoustic version of Bizet's score.