ORIGINAL CINEMA / RYAN CHANG
The films.
Two completed films, one short collage and one completed feature screenplay—an authored body of work moving through projection, ritual, addiction and the fight to reclaim the self.
Moon in
Scorpio
A shadow initiation.
Trailer
Winner of Bold Voices
Black Box Film Festival · 2023
Shot entirely on the 53rd anniversary of Yukio Mishima’s suicide, Moon in Scorpio was filmed in a microcinema immediately following a screening of Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters.
The work functions as a ritual of reckoning—an exploration of the moment when parts of the self must symbolically die in order for something true to emerge.
This is not a film about closure.
It is a meditation on the sacred rupture:
a descent into the pain of shedding what no longer serves, and the flicker of power that appears in its place.
SELECTED JURY FEEDBACK
“Very well done Lynchian fever dream that explores the violence and self-destruction at the heart of American culture.”
“Ambitious and unsettling.”
“Really evocative and disturbing and self-assured in its odd tone.”
“It has a confidence and commitment that made it really work for me.”
“A lot of great editing, cinematography, set design, costuming—really quite a lot of effort put into bringing this vision to life.”
“The result is a coherent, confident work. May not be to everyone's taste, but it's original and technically very proficient.”
Anonymous jury feedback · Black Box Film Festival
THOTH
A film for your nervous system.
Trailer
ONLY U.S. WINNER at the 2025 International Avant-Garde Awards (Best Experimental Short & Best Visual Effects).
Made by Ryan with one actor and built from more than 10,000 individually captured photographs running at 60 frames per second, THOTH descends into the compulsive loops that keep us tied to addiction—repetition, desensitization, failed escape and the feeling of being trapped inside a pattern we can see but cannot leave.
This is not a film about purity.
It is about interruption:
the moment the loop breaks, the artificial gives way to something living, and escape becomes visible.
“A fun and mesmerizingly trippy film to watch!”
Jerry Toth · International Avant-Garde Film Awards
Selections & additional recognition
Libra: Respect in Diamonds
A reclamation.
THOTH TAROT · FIRST ENGLISH DISPLAY SINCE 1962 · PHOTOGRAPHED AT THE WARBURG INSTITUTE
Complete piece available · Click to watch
SHORT COLLAGE · 16MM + DIGITAL
London · The Warburg Institute · Lady Frieda Harris’s original Thoth paintings
A short visual collage built from rare access to the original Thoth paintings.
Ryan flew to London after the Warburg Institute granted him access to photograph Lady Frieda Harris’s original Thoth Tarot paintings at their first display in England since her death in 1962.
Made in conversation with Kenneth Anger’s The Man We Want to Hang, the piece collages the paintings with symbols found throughout the city and a brief appearance of the High Priestess—revealing occult language not as a relic, but as something embedded in everyday life.
Rather than explain the Tarot, Libra lets the symbols walk it rather than talk it—out of the archive, through the city and back into everyday life.
Pisces Rising
A frequency weapon.
THE STAR DEMANDS COMPLIANCE. THE QUEEN TESTS WHAT’S LEFT.
Feature film
Screenplay complete · Producer package ready
Inside a brutal military conditioning program built around obedience to the Star, recruits are disappearing and the Sergeant is losing control. With 96 hours until a solar eclipse, Leo is drawn into the orbit of the Pisces Queen and her ritual feminine order—then discovers he may be the final sacrifice.
As both worlds close around him, Leo must survive their competing gauntlets, reclaim the will to choose and escape before the old world is destroyed.
Pisces Rising expands territory Ryan has already made his own. Moon in Scorpio and THOTH confront projection, institutions and the violence they feed in American culture; the feature carries that fracture into military programming and imposed roles, asking what it takes to unprogram, recover self-understanding and find the gold beyond the damage.
Institutions turn men into instruments, while projection turns women into prizes, roles and utility until desire becomes a trap of its own making. Both fracture the self.
The Queen is the film’s still point; the man under pressure is forced to choose. Tense and seductive, the story carries its critique through disappearances, erotic danger and ritual violence inside a constantly constricting bottle thriller.
The screenplay, one-sheet, production assumptions, visual development and working package are ready.