Skye Gildner

I love watching films. Sitting in a darkened theater and experiencing a well-crafted scene, where the images, sounds, and rhythms align, creates such a visceral emotional response that I leave the theater a different person than when I walked in.

These experiences sparked my fascination with how identity is constructed. While busying myself with academic studies, I realized identity isn't just a theme biology, psychology, and film happen to share; it is a phenomenon they are all trying to explain from different perspectives. Biology provides the physical systems that generate raw perception. Psychology explains how we interpret those inputs into a sense of identity. Story is how we organize, share, and reconstruct that identity with others.

For me, film is the best medium for this exploration because it mimics human sensory perception itself. By combining image, sound, and perspective, cinema allows an audience to experience another person's subjective reality in ways literature or theater cannot. By understanding the underlying biological and psychological mechanics, I hope to create films that don't just show what a character feels, but allows the audience to experience it from the inside out.

My IB Higher Level studies in Biology (hardware), Psychology (software), and Film (story) serve as an interdisciplinary toolkit to investigate how human identity is constructed.

I view identity not as a fixed or linear, but as a continuous loop: biological systems enable perception, psychological processes structure it into a sense of self, and film translates that experience into narrative—which, in turn, rewires how we perceive who we are.