Deer Hunter is an assemblage of archival footage, family home videos, and speculative documentary produced using generative AI. The film explores masculinity, inheritance, and nationalism through the artist’s relationship to the men in his family: Italian immigrants who fled fascism for America, his terminally ill godfather, and his newborn son. Returning to Italy to film in the landscape his ancestors once left, the work traces a circular movement between origin and destination.

At the center of the film is an AI-generated American white-tailed deer, introduced into documentary footage of Rome’s EUR district, known for its monumental Fascist-era architecture. Created using a custom model trained on the White-tailed deer species, the deer produces moments of ecological fiction—scenes that appear observational but are constructed through machine learning.

These sequences are juxtaposed with archival footage of an “American Hunter” reading from José Ortega y Gasset’s Meditations on Hunting, alongside childhood home videos of the artist’s family tracking deer through forests. The deer becomes a figure through which the film considers beauty and violence, inheritance and masculinity, and the ways humans construct and project ideas of the natural world.