A breathtakingly beautiful short film about a brother and sister dealing differently with wrapping up their lives before moving to the big city.
The brother is facing the future, he is eager to get on with living his life in the city, and all the opportunities it might afford. The sister wants to go one last time to the old village where they grew up, now completely flooded and partly submerged. She wants to pay her respects at the tomb of her parents, and hopes that the move won’t break her relationship with their spirits. She goes once again to mourn, a process that takes as long as loving.
She and her brother are moving further and further away from their past, but also from each other, in attitude and outlook. But the hope of the movie is all distances can close.
Oskar Salomonowitz was a 12-year-old boy who drew 206 pages on a flip book to make his first animation, when he was suddenly killed in an accident. His father finishes the story.
The animation itself is a delightfully childlike cartoon of two stickmen fighting with swords while flying with jetpacks on their feet. The joyful pew-pew of their dynamic aerial fight slows as it reaches Oskar’s last images. When his father completes it, combining sputtering jet-boots and parachutes and bombs, it is a triumphant end to the story.
It’s 2 minutes long. It’s simple and silly. It’ll make you cry.
It’s Sasha’s last day in the orphanage. He’s about to be adopted by a nice woman and taken to America. He’s meant to be acting like he’s won the jackpot but he’s not.
The care workers are harassed with him, he hasn’t packed, he’s left his bed a mess, he hasn’t rehearsed the speech thanking his new mother in English. He tries to sneak off with the other boys, but their jealousy and resentment soon breaks down into open aggression. The adults regard his hesitancy as willfulness and shilly-shallying. No one seems to consider what it’s like for this boy to leave Ukraine, the only home he’s ever known, and the last chance to be reclaimed by his biological family.
A film about the difficulty of forging and breaking the bonds of family.
Noir-soleil is animated short about an unforeseen family reunion.
Everything in the film is about incongruous contrasts. The beautiful artwork, at times so gentle and soft, provides an unlikely medium for a story with such dark subjects.
The volcano rumblings around Pompeii set off a minor earthquake, which causes it to release one of its secrets. A body concealed beneath the water is set free, and rises to the surface. Miles away, in an isolated cabin, a man gets a voicemail to come ID the corpse.
On the boat crossing the Bay of Naples, the man, Dino, runs into his daughter, Victoria. Both were contacted by the police to give a DNA test to identify the body. What follows is an odd couple of days, which are half like a holiday, with Victoria, who has never been to her father’s old home, taking in the tourist sites, and half like a wake, filled with tension and frustrated grief.
Victoria and Dino’s relationship runs both in parallels and contrasts with his relationship with his father. Dino’s father was abusive when he was around, and when he disappeared, he assumed he had abandoned the family to start a new life in America. He was absent for most of Dino’s life and not approachable even before that. Dino’s relationship with Victoria is different, loving, but he still struggles to talk, to express his feelings. She is an adult, and they are not in close contact, but nonetheless she shows support, patience and love for him. Dino has clearly tried to be a better father than he got, but his upbringing has left its mark on him, and there is a silence and a distance that will always be there.
A film about the intergenerational legacy of trauma, told with both understanding and hope.
As night descends on Rio de Janiero, the fireflies come out. Equally beautiful are the nocturnal inhabitants of Flamingo Park. There they pray, bathe, and make love beneath the moonlight.
The nightlife of a city always represents its unseen self, the truth we deny in ourselves in the bright light of day, beneath the righteous judgement of how we should be. Ironic then that castigated to the dark should be scenes so reminiscent of the Garden of Eden. Naked and unashamed, queer men cruise the avenues of trees. With kindness and care towards animals, a woman pushing a shopping trolley distributes food to the city’s stray cats. An old man prays to the traditional gods, giving thanks for the trees that surround him.
A beautiful film, showing what is often unseen, but in its own way holy.
Breathtakingly honest to the point of being painfully vulnerable, Diana Nguyen confronts the heartbreak at the centre of her and her father’s relationship. She rediscovers a cache of letters her father sent her when she was a child. He was in prison when she was young, but they wrote back and forth all the time, telling each other about their day, and being open about the things that mattered to them. Despite the physical distance, Diana felt supported, loved and seen.
That changed when he got out of prison. He seemed driven by the need to have a son, and after her mother had three miscarriages, he abandoned the family. He now has a new family, back in Vietnam, with a son, and doesn’t keep in touch with his daughter.
While her father is Vietnamese, Diana is Czech, and she doesn’t understand the hold the old traditions had over him, the idea that if he didn’t bear a son, he would be responsible for the end of his bloodline. The whole film takes the form of a letter, as Diana attempts to comprehend his choice, despite the obvious pain it causes her.
The visuals of the film are made up of these old letters, old family photos and videos. While I normally wouldn’t recommend collage animation and mixed media films for everyone, this is one I definitely would, because it is the most fitting match of media and subject, and while creative, its meaning remains perfectly clear.
The legacy of a love interrupted is laid bare in this brave and intimate film.
A depressed insomniac is driving in the rain at night when a tall, buxom woman in a glittering evening dress calls out, “Beware of the slippery road – it’s dangerous!” He comes off his moped, and so begins the start of tentative but nurturing friendship.
Diana is the woman. Despite her flashy dress and her ample frame, she is surprisingly gentle and tender. She visits him in the hospital, mending his torn up clothes. I like how the film doesn’t just expect us to assume that Diana is kind, like so many films just expect you to think well of the main character. We see Diana howf Goncalo’s moped up 4 flights of stairs to her flat, to keep it safe. When she scrapes the bannister, we see her go back and paint over the scratch using her nail varnish. In this small unnoticed act, you see her consideration for others.
Goncalo’s more stand-offish. Previous to coming off his bike, he had visited his therapist in the middle of the night, who fed him a sleeping pill for his insomnia. It’s probably that which made him come off his bike, but given his state of mind, it’s possible it wasn’t entirely an accident. He feels quite closed in his early interactions with Diana.
Slowly as they begin their friendship, after Goncalo leaves hospital, they bring a hope and companionship to one another’s lives. A straightforward and tender story.
Really lovely, interesting and warm short film about a group of laundry workers getting together a poster celebrating the festival of Ganesh.
Now, when I say poster, I don’t mean a bit of A4 stuck up in the break room. I mean something the size of a barn door. One guy uses last year’s poster to waterproof one side of his house. These are beasts, man. And in India, posters are a very big deal. Rajesh, the main character in the documentary, says, “Without a poster, you don’t exist!” A poster is engagement with the social, religious, and political life of the community.
It might seem a little ridiculous, viewed from Glasgow, this obsession with getting the biggest poster with the most stuff jammed on it. Especially when it looks like it’s made in MS Paint, and has low-res mobile photos of the folk on it. But the aesthetic does draw you in, as the camera passes rows of them celebrating a politician’s birthday, it does become hypnotic. It reminds me of nothing so much as the way people go on about their Christmas lights over here.
There is a comedy element of watching the guys at the laundry bicker over the layout of the poster, suggesting endless changes as they peer at the latest draft on the mobile phone. Can you darken my sunglasses? Can you make my bindi bigger? Can you turn down the contrast so my hair doesn’t look thin? This year Covid has hit, so they stick an image containing safety advice in the corner too.
This is what I like in a short documentary, a feeling like I got to be somewhere, listening to someone talk about what is important to them. There’s a warm bond of friendship between Rajesh and the other laundry workers, and it felt nice to meet them all. With the medical and financial difficulties Covid is bringing, it’s good to see them still find a way to carry on their part in the life of their community.
Pride is the name of the University of Virginia’s Black Student Alliance’s newspaper. The short film is set back in the 1990s and depicts the student group getting together to discuss what to put out in their latest issue.
The topic is financial aid is brought up, how it’s not enough, how difficult it is to apply for, how unhelpful the whole service is. The students laugh at the possibility of such an article putting their own funding in jeopardy, since they are so routinely ignored it’s unlikely anyone in authority will read it. The conversation, set 30 years ago, is as relevant as ever today.
You see the writer typing up the story on a typewriter, then the copies being printed off on a rotary press. It looks so antiquated now, it might as well have been chiselled tablets.
An interesting look at the long tradition of protest and citizen journalism that feeds into today’s world.
