Bob is a cleaning robot, and his task is to clean his owner's room every day. Taking out the trash and tidying up the desk is part of his daily routine. One day, while performing his usual duties, something unusual happens. He touches the keyboard of the computer on the desk while cleaning it. The screen lights up, revealing an image of the new NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090.
Bob, the cleaning robot, instantly feels an emotion he has never known before at the sight of that beautiful machine. Romantic music begins to play in the background, time slows down, and he forgets his core function. He glitches out. Days pass as he stares at the image, neglecting his work and forgetting that his sole purpose in life was to clean the room.
The trash piles up, and he never takes it out. Frustrated by his ineffectiveness, his owner decides to throw him away. Bob is tossed toward the dumpster so carelessly that he doesn't even land inside. He hits the rim and falls to the side, among the other discarded trash but he couldn’t care less. He never recovers from the glitch that emotion triggered in him, the glitch that started the moment he laid eyes on it.
“Point of No Return” is an animated short about an alien my stand-in for “non-resident alien” status leaving home, Bangladesh to study at the University of Idaho. I expected America to be skyscrapers and neon. Landing in Idaho was a shock: open fields, quiet towns, and a reality I never pictured. Through humor and reflection, the film shows how that unexpected first landing reshaped my idea of America, identity, and belonging.