A Tisch alum turns his childhood high school into the claustrophobic stage for a silent power struggle.
In Galapagos, director Kyle Sims stages a dialogue-free duel between a teacher and a student — relying on physical performance, animals and the school’s architecture.
Play · vimeoAccording to Directors Notes, Kyle Sims is a Tisch School of the Arts alum and a commercials director who has returned to short-form storytelling with Galapagos, a wordless thriller about a lonely teacher whose classroom rabbit disappears and the unsettling encounter that follows.
The film leans entirely on physical performance. As Sims tells Directors Notes, “There’s something liberating about abandoning the dialogue convention and focusing entirely on the physicality of the performances.” The lack of speech forces attention onto gesture, posture and tiny shifts in power.
Sims cast Catherine Curtin and Trace Talbot as his two leads. He told Directors Notes he “still remember[s] discovering Trace Talbot in this short called Two Little Boys,” and says he reverse-engineered the student role for him. Directors Notes credits the chemistry between Curtin and Talbot — shot largely chronologically — with allowing long, uninterrupted takes that let the actors find unspoken nuance.
Cinematographer Alex Hass (named by Directors Notes) helped build the film’s visual language around the vintage high school Sims attended. Sims told Directors Notes he wrote the film for that particular location and thanked “Principal Pigeon” for access. The school’s architecture — from a locker-room-turned-bathroom to basement dressing rooms — dictated camera placement and tone.
Animals play a key role. Directors Notes describes a menagerie that includes a rabbit named Sallie, a snake whose motion was created in-camera then reversed in post, and a howling dog used for emotional weight. Sims frames the film’s title as a nod to Darwin and the idea of evolution that underpins the story.
For more on Sims and to see his work, Directors Notes points readers to his Instagram @kylemsims and his website kylemsims.com.
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