Category: Encounters

A Safe Place While It’s Raining is a short film encompassing a conversation between a brother and sister.

It’s clear the talk takes place after the loss of their last parent. They discuss their mother’s illness and how they coped. It has the air of exhaustion, like a quiet and intimate time after the rigours of the most intense and public parts of grief. I imagine the sister climbing under the covers of her mother’s bed at the end of a very long funeral tea, and her brother coming to find her after the final guests are gone.

Underneath what they are saying seems to be a tentativeness, like they are checking with each other, after this devastating loss, that they are still a family. The brother’s tone is slightly coaxing, slightly comforting, but the biggest kindness is that neither one asks the other to leave the canopy of their mother’s blanket.

As the rain starts to fall outside, the sound is muffled behind the glass, beneath the bedding, to the point where even it can sound comforting.

Father is a short film about a father-son relationship. Jacinto picks up his teenage son Shakur for a long weekend break by the seaside.

The film is full of the quite mundane, standard parental activities, like buying Shakur a new tracksuit, and asking how he’s getting on in school, along with the dreich holiday classics of playing chess and going ten pin bowling. When you are a kid you always roll your eyes at how your parents get so invested in such rinkydink shit. It’s only when you grow up you realise that most things in this world have teeth and sharp edges, and this rinkydink shit is probably the last truly, harmlessly nice things you’ll do together.

Shakur doesn’t seem to be the kind of sullen wean I was. He seems genuinely pleased to be spending time with his father, even if his demeanour is not overly animated. You get the sense that he places as much value on his time with his father as his father does with him.

From the outset, you are told that Shakur doesn’t live with his father, and despite his fierce love, Jacinto has only seen his son sporadically. Throughout the film, Jacinto phones his girlfriend in the evening to keep in touch, and she asks how their day has been. At the end of the film, Jacinto talks to her about what it was like when social work came and took Shakur away. Without going into detail about the cause, he just talks sadly about how everything felt out of his control back then. That the worst thing about it was not being in control of whether you saw your kid or not, like for this trip, having to ask the social if you can take your kid to the seaside for the weekend and have them tell you they’d check and make sure it was convenient for the foster parents, then let you know.

Whatever has happened in the past, it’s obvious from the trip that both the father and the son want to have a relationship with one another, and are willing to put in the time and vulnerability to make it happen.

Heartwarming wee film.

Welcome to the Ball is a beautiful short film about a kid, Sean, who is not concerned about gender norms, who makes friends with a young deaf kid. A totally joyful wee film about making a connection.

The film starts with Sean delivering bed sheet dress realness and voguing in front of their teddy bears. Sean is played by child star drag queen Lactatia, from Drag Kids, so you know she’s delivering the goods. After dinner with their supportive and friendly butch mum, Sean stays up learning sign language online.

The next morning Sean approaches another kid playing with a Barbie. Slowly, Sean introduces themselves in ASL. The kid says their name is Noah, and when Sean invites them to come play back at their house, Noah jumps at the chance. There, they play dress up, with Sean putting lipstick on Noah. Without music, they start to dance, whirling around together and laughing.

As the film closes, the perspective switches to Noah. In the silence of their world, as they spin around in the colour and joy of Sean’s room, all you can hear is the sound of their heart beat. And as they gaze at Sean, you hear their heart beat quicken, with that first gentle childhood connection.

Great wee film.

In the French Canadian snows, a woman in a miserable and bullying marriage comes to the end of her tether and escapes in her husband’s truck . . . only to run smack-bang into more trouble. Desperate not to return to her old life, the day will see how far she is willing to go for her freedom. A whole movie in 20 minutes, I’ll End Up In Jail manages to be an action thriller with a character core. Great stuff.

A French teenager accompanies her warring parents on a family holiday to Death Valley in the US in this emotional short animated film.

Stuck between her volcanic father, whose temper is on a hair trigger, and her mother’s rictus grin which seems to convey even more tension in its efforts to dispel it, Gabrielle plays tentative peacemaker. She accompanies her mother on a drive out into the desert, as her father is left to expel his bad temper in unpacking.

There, beneath the beautiful scenery, the running from their problems stops for a single moment, as they experience wonder at the towering Trona Pinnacles by sunset. In this place so stark and brutal, in a place named after death itself, it feels like the end of the world, yet as night descends it is peaceful, awe-inspiring, and dwarfing in its timeless grandeur.

Jeijay is a short animation depicting the dissolution of a romantic relationship.

Their house floats above the street, soaring with the elation of their new love. But as time passes, the bright skies turn gloomy, and eventually rain falls, breaching their sanctum. Being skybound, which at first seemed to symbolise how enraptured they were with each other, comes to convey isolation, as their investment in this relationship has left them with no other connections.

As both members of the couple start to drift apart, they feel increasingly alone in this house that is crumbling under the torrent of rain. Will the coming floods mean drowning, or sailing to freedom?

Da Yie, meaning Good Night, is a short film following kids Matilda and Prince, as they spend a day going from the innocence of childhood to becoming aware of the dangers of the adult world lurking around them.

It begins with the kids at play. Smart, capable, confident Matilda is beating the boys at football. Prince is more fretful, he was supposed to be babysitting his younger sibling while his mum was out. However he can’t help but rise to Matilda’s playful taunts, and go along with her, when she makes every game seem like an adventure.

To try and avoid a hiding from his mother, Prince takes up an offer by Bogah, a foreigner who hangs about the neighbourhood, to take him and Matilda for a run in his motor. The car is swanky and expensive, Bogah takes them for a big meal at a restaurant, and helps Prince overcome his fear of the ocean as they play at the beach, along the beautiful Ghanaian coast.

There a sense of unease that settles in for the audience, watching as Prince’s wary nature is repeatedly bowled over by Matilda’s fearless belief that this is just another adventure. Despite everything you know as an adult, you hope Bogah is just a kindly adult giving the kids some respite.

As the day turns to night, and Prince repeatedly asks to go home, the kids realise they have unwittingly gotten into a dangerous situation. Their first real taste of the dangers that lurk outside the safety of their home streets brings them up stunned.

Da Yie is a really great short film for taking a simple story set over a day and showing how, by seemingly innocent and kindly steps, children can be led into danger. For the kids themselves, they give brilliant performances, showing how their natures can be double-edged, their confidence can make them either reckless or resourceful, their wariness can make them either indecisive or instinctual. Outstanding wee film.