Countless small choices. One decisive instant.
Maxi
A novice criminal, stumbling into a life of crime and learning to navigate its dangerous waters — one small decision at a time.
From the film.
Harold
A contented retiree on the city's peaceful outskirts, enjoying the fruits of his labor — a successful security-bar business, now run by his daughter.
From the film.
Through a web of decisions and circumstances, their separate paths converge at a single, pivotal moment that irreversibly alters both their lives. The film is about how time shapes destiny through accidents.
The film's emblem — circles within circles: infinite approaches to a single moment.
The narrative unfolds as multiple perspectives of one fateful day — different entry points into the same timeline. Each version reveals new layers of the two men's connection, suggesting infinite possibilities while moving inexorably toward their fated encounter.
From the film.
A program constructs each version moments before you watch — weaving audio, music, and image through combinatorial paths — anywhere from five to seventy minutes, the story held coherent at every length. Pre-rendered versions live online; the real-time generator shipped on the film's USB edition. It is the second work in a twenty-year exploration of modular cinema, built on A Space of Time.
Move the lever to set a length — five to seventy minutes — and one of the film's pre-rendered versions loads. Three were first shown at the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, in 2017.
The full generator — shipped on the film's USB edition — builds each version in real time, and offers more than length:
The second modular film: A Space of Time · 2003 → Accidental Occurrence · 2017 → Big Data · 2019 → Uku Pacha · 2021
Best Experimental Short Film — Premios Latino, Spain.
Twelve festivals, six continents.
Pune Short Film Festival (India)·Espacio Enter (Spain)·Salón Internacional de la Luz (Colombia)·CICA Experimental Film & Video Exhibition (South Korea)·Auckland International Film Festival (New Zealand)·Goa Short Film Festival (India)·SHORT to the point (Romania)·Golden Bridge Festival (Russia)·NCCC Film & Animation Festival (USA)·Digital Big Screen (Slovenia)·London Greek Film Festival (England)
His idea of cinema could come to mean a contribution as radical as the integration of sound or color to the medium.
Héctor Perea — “Las tramas de la trama en la reconstrucción del tiempo. El cine ilimitado de Diego Bonilla,” in Las formas plurales de la genericidad literaria, ed. Eduardo Ramos-Izquierdo & Sofía Mateos Gómez · Colloquia (Sorbonne), 2019, pp. 261–272
Perea — of UNAM, and a holder of the Alfonso Reyes Prize — reads Accidental Occurrence as the most refined instance of Bonilla's variable cinema, setting it in a lineage from Georges Méliès through Cortázar's Rayuela to González Iñárritu's Carne y Arena. For him the work's procedural openness is at once its greatest strength and its deepest risk: like Brian Eno's 77 Million Paintings, it trades the single, finished, marketable film for an unlimited succession of versions — a direct challenge to what a film is assumed to be.
Diego Bonilla — concept, script, production, direction, editing, programming
John Mannion — photography direction
Sarah Pickett — music composition & sound design
Chema Salinas — location sound & soundtrack
Sean Hovendick — additional photography
Stephan Eichorn — additional programming
Michael Karpeev — special effects
Jared Landberg — location production management
Special thanks to Bob & Jane Pickett, Penny Beile, Anne Neville-Bonilla, Eric Stanist, Fowler Custom Homes, and Gábor Damásdi.