Press kit

Ringatory

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The film

Title: Ringatory
Format: Short film, 16 minutes
Written and directed by: Maurice Grey
Produced by: ouidembois, Spielplatz
Shot on: Digital, 4K
Sound: 5.1 surround
Language: English and German, with English subtitles
Premiere: Sunday 15 November 2026, IL KINO, Berlin
Festivals: Official selection, International Sound & Film Music Festival 2026. Nominated for Best Score and the Horizon Award.
Official selection, Verona International Short Film Festival 2026. Nominated for Best Original Score and in the New Filmmakers Shorts Competition.
Trailer: youtu.be/gRaPxxiNq8s (opens in a new tab)
Film page: ouidembois.com/ringatory
Press contact: dan@ouidembois.com

Synopsis

One line

Ringatory is a surreal short thriller about an American in Berlin who boards the train to his first day at a new job and discovers it has no next stop.

Short

Ringatory is a surreal short thriller about an American in Berlin who boards the train to his first day at a new job and discovers it has no next stop. Trapped in a single endless car as three towering figures work their way down the aisle, he learns the only way off is to give up the one thing he has spent his life hiding.

Long

Patrick Walker is an American in Berlin with a new job and a life he has arranged very carefully. On his first day he boards the Ringbahn, the circle line that loops the city, and tries to disappear into the commute. The other passengers will not stop staring.

Then the train changes. The car stretches impossibly long. Every door opens onto the same car. The commuters around him darken into silhouettes with burning eyes, and the world bleaches to black and white. From the far end come three towering figures carrying a rusted iron box, working seat by seat, taking something from every passenger they reach.

Patrick offers what he has. Money, his phone, his credentials. None of it is enough. The box wants the one thing he has never let anyone see.

Shot with an all-Berlin crew, Ringatory is a surreal thriller about what it costs to be seen.

Writer and director

Maurice Grey

Maurice Grey is a Black American writer, director and actor based in Berlin. He trained in acting at LAMDA and completed the screenwriting program at Sundance Collab.

His work is about race, class, masculinity, code-switching, and the invisible systems that shape behavior in public space.

His directorial debut, the short film Ringatory, was nominated for Best Score and the Horizon Award at the International Sound & Film Music Festival in Croatia in 2026, and selected at the Verona International Short Film Festival. It is set on a Berlin train and it is about what it costs to be looked at.

Maurice Grey is the pen name of Danny Miller, who produces under ouidembois.

Director’s statement

In Berlin, I noticed how often I was being looked at on the street. What stayed with me was the specific feeling of being fixed on. Walking through Prenzlauer Berg, I would notice through my peripheral vision when someone’s head kept turning in my direction as we moved past each other. Their body would keep going. Their eyes would stay with me.

I did not want to wait for someone else to decide how a Black American man in Germany should be seen. The project is built around the tension and double consciousness of the Black American experience. If we do not author the gaze, we remain trapped inside it.

A mask calcifies. A performance settles in. You learn what face to wear before entering the room. If you spend your life being inspected, you can begin to live for an imagined observer.

I am interested in the return.

Maurice Grey · from the essay “What the [white] gaze wants” (opens in a new tab)

Director of photography

Pablo Rojas Castillo

Pablo Rojas Castillo is a film director, writer, cinematographer, editor and producer from Guatemala, Central America. He graduated from the All-Russian State University of Cinematography named after S. A. Gerasimov in 2017 and completed his studies at the Marina Razbezhkina and Mikhail Ugarov School of Documentary Film and Theatre in 2020. In 2024, he earned a degree in Narrative Direction from the Workshop of Boris Khlebnikov and Bakur Bakuradze at Cinema School Studio 24.