Johnny and Mary are siblings bound together through childhood abandonment, scraping by in a dead-end rural town. Johnny, a military drone pilot, executes killings by day and returns each night to a home already hollowed out. Brutal visions of the battlefields he surveils invade his life, repeating and distorting without release. Mary—abrasive, funny, and fiercely protective—dates indiscriminately, holding their shared life together through sheer force of will. When Johnny dies by suicide, reality shifts into an abstract afterlife, where personal guilt is stripped of its human scale and dissolved into something vast and impersonal. Drawn from interviews with real U.S. military drone pilots living with PTSD, Variations on Violence visualizes trauma’s inescapable spread.
Zachary Nichols is a sculptor and creative director who approaches filmmaking as an extension of his studio practice. He owns design studio George & Elaine and works independently outside a traditional agency structure. Nichols worked with David Lynch on his online television channel, live events, short films, and design. His own short films have screened across the United States and Canada.