SHAPE SHIFTERS
A personal take on Daniel Criblez's new Short Film, SAME AS U
SHAPE SHIFTERS
A personal take on Daniel Criblez’s new Short Film, SAME AS U
Written by Alejandro Veciana
I first met Dan Criblez (aka Weeze) at a show at Mercury Lounge in 2018. At the time, I was going through a major transition in my life. After graduating from film school in 2015, I had found myself in a spiral of professional and financial instability, desperately trying to find steady work as a freelance writer, producer, and editor while moving from apartment to apartment, rotating roommates, jobs, and friendships. I struggled tremendously. It wasn’t until I finally decided to just get a retail job and landed at a popular hot sauce store in Williamsburg that I felt a sense of stability and confidence return.
I was invited to that show at Mercury Lounge through some coworkers. Enter Dan Criblez: a skinny, long-haired, bookish-looking twenty-something with loads of confidence. He’s an artist, he said. He does sculpture, drawing, animation, painting, film, music, and even comes up with original recipes. He was selling t-shirts he had designed at the merch table that night for his brother’s band, Ritual Talk. I bought one, naturally, and we became instant friends.
Since then, whenever there’s been an important transition in my life, Dan has made an appearance. Like a cameo appearance in a movie or show, he makes a welcomed entrance worthy of an applause break and other times as a key character in my story. He and I collaborated on the first and only feature film I ever produced. He flew to Barcelona to celebrate my 30th birthday. He performed at my wedding. And I suspect he will make many more appearances in my life as more transitions and new chapters emerge. For now, though, he leaves New York City behind after many years of living in Brooklyn, entering a new chapter in his own life.
SAME AS U | Daniel Criblez | 2026
His latest piece, SAME AS U, captures this moment of transition. “We are always evolving through our surroundings, our teachings, and our communities,” he says. “SAME AS U is a surrealist film that depicts an identity in transition — a goodbye letter to Brooklyn, New York, and to the person I was there.”
The three-minute film begins with a ball rolling down the street and into a subway platform. As if it has a life of its own, the ball finds its way back into the street and bumps into a vintage-looking suitcase. You notice the ball has turned into an apple. Then a figure approaches and the music kicks in. What follows is essentially a game of visual transitions — a kind of optical Rube Goldberg machine. A series of every day backdrops with objects turning into other objects playfully match-cutting from one shot to the other. These objects are shape-shifting in a faceless world.
Bodies and things appear and disappear. Yes, it’s a faceless world, but not an empty one—more like a reality in flux, where identity exists in motion rather than in fixed form. In preparing to write this, I watched the film a few times, and on the third or fourth time, I noticed that the film was less about Dan leaving his Brooklyn life behind and more about the strange emotional state of being in constant motion and constant change. The moment your body is still physically present but your brain has made the leap and has already moved on somewhere else. Everything feels familiar and alien at the same time. Your surroundings start to feel like props in a play where you’re about to exit the stage.
In that sense, SAME AS U feels like a film about change more than anything else and maybe that’s why it resonates so deeply with me. Not because both Dan and I are going through changes in life right now, but because I am so deeply familiar with this in-between space, this transitional state of being. If you live in New York long enough, you know what I am talking about. You are always transitioning, always reshaping, always trying to recognize yourself in whatever form you’ve temporarily taken.
Written by Alejandro Veciana