The Dulcinée Dialectic

After artist Dulcinée DeGuere is diagnosed with bipolar II, her filmmaker partner Tao Ruspoli begins documenting her journey through mania, depression, and the slow reckoning of diagnosis. Simultaneously, he turns to an artificial intelligence he names "Dulcinea" — a machine that processes language without feeling — creating two parallel conversations: one with a woman of flesh and blood navigating the extremes of human consciousness, the other with the technology that was, at that very moment, sending the world into its own kind of manic episode.

His subjects turn the camera back on him — Dulcinée most fiercely, but also the philosophers, scientists, and writers he's brought into the conversation, all of whom challenge the ethics of documenting mental illness and force Ruspoli to face his own retreat into screens and abstraction rather than sit with another person's pain.

Inspired by Chris Marker's Sans Soleil and shot across locations from the apocalyptic beauty of Bombay Beach to Death Valley's ephemeral Lake Manly, The Dulcinée Dialectic combines vérité documentary, purposefully integrated AI-generated imagery, philosophical dialogue, and Dulcinée's searing original poetry into a work that refuses tidy resolution.