Bliss Reel: "That moment when you realize something might be fleeting"

In an age when it feels easier to drift away than stay anchored, Bliss Reel arrives as a tactile plea to linger, moment by moment, in the warmth of embodied connection. Conceived by creative director Sarah Kendric, this project unfolds through four film vignettes and an 84-page zine, collaboratively brought to life with her New York creative community. Rather than spotlighting pleasure as a solitary indulgence or a commodified experience, Bliss Reel emulates the kind that seeps through the cracks of a day – shared in a glance, passed from mouth to mouth in a laugh or a kiss, folded quietly into the warmth of being with others. 

Kendric began shaping Bliss Reel during a period of unease, when anxiety and helplessness felt like the background hum of everyday life – a feeling anyone who even occasionally reads the news can relate to. “The project was initially motivated by me wanting to do something about the feelings of dread I was experiencing around how our political climate is shaping our culture,” she recalls. Rather than dissolving into paralysis, she turned to pleasure as a counterweight: “an exercise in reminding myself what makes me feel that feeling of being present in a moment of passion.”

The responses she collected illuminated a broader – shared – generational desire for connection. “Something that surprised me was how little my peers explicitly mentioned sex when asked about their associations with pleasure. This theme of community and connection really emerged instead – people cited things like collaboration, being present with their partners, and feeling grounded as pleasurable moments for them. In collecting these responses, I saw my own motivations for making Bliss Reel reflected back at me.”

What emerged was not hedonism for its own sake, but a study in collective attunement – pleasure as a way of staying in the body, staying with each other, when the first instinct might be to run and dissociate. It’s subjective yet communal evocations of pleasure, circling around it in words, gestures, and images until it becomes palpable. Featuring some of Kendric’s favourite quotes from the zine alongside the film stills, this is your invitation to slow down, breathe, and carve out a space for your own pleasure.