Steady Hand
Steady Hand
A man survives a heart attack with the help of a presence he has known since childhood. Adapted from Steve Sides’s memoir By the Grace of God.
The film
A hand in the dark.
At a church camp in the summer of 1978, Steve “Steady” Sides encounters the faith that will anchor his life. On New Year’s Day 2018, home alone and suffering a massive heart attack, he tries to sleep. A force he recognizes from his youth pulls him from bed and toward his truck.
Through the pre-dawn darkness, that unseen presence guides him past the hospital he intended to reach and toward the Oklahoma Heart Institute. After emergency surgery for critical blockages in his “widow maker” artery, Steve meets an elderly man whose words of reassurance stay with him. He comes to believe the man was an angel.
Told through nonlinear, impressionistic images, Steady Hand is a film about surrender, memory, grace, and faith.
Official selection and nominee at the 2026 Red Dirt Film Festival; also entered into Sundance and Ann Arbor. See the festival record ↗
Director statement
From the page.
My work begins with the written word. My specialty is adapting books, searching for the core emotion of a story and translating it into a new cinematic language. To do this, I direct artificial intelligence.
As the director, I provide the narrative soul, the emotional arc, and the artistic taste. The AI becomes my camera, my crew, and my VFX team, translating that core emotion into visuals that were previously unimaginable for independent, experimental filmmaking.
I believe this technology’s true power isn’t in the spectacle, but in its ability to visually articulate feelings that words alone cannot capture. My focus is on creating films that honor the source material and connect with an audience in a fundamentally human way.
About the director
David Levine Bramante.
David is a filmmaker, technologist, and founder of CinemaMachina. He adapts written stories and makes original shorts with generative AI, searching for images that hold the emotion of the source material. His art practice began in Los Angeles; he is based in Austin. He also founded CodexDeus ↗.
