This short film is a visualization of selected extracts from David Foster Wallace's commencement address to the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon College. The speech was eventually published in its entirety as "This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life." In it, Wallace very eloquently discusses "the difficulty of empathy," "the importance of being well adjusted," and "the essential lonesomeness of adult life.” You can read the full speech at the Internet Archive.
Sadly, Wallace committed suicide by hanging himself less than four years after delivering this stirring speech. In the aftermath of his suicide, it was revealed that Wallace had been fighting a loosing battle with depression for over twenty years. Out of concern for Wallace's legacy, his estate began working to remove this now-ironic commencement address and several other pieces of Wallace's work from the internet. Of course, the internet being what it is, fans raced to re-post Wallace's work in droves and this particular video is one such effort.
The way I've heard it told, this particular video is an attempt to incorporate Wallace's wise words into a fresh copyrightable work, so that Wallace's estate can no long remove them from a site with a DMCA complaint. I'm not sure that's accurate, but it's still a video worth posting.
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