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.
Evil Dead inspired Japanese short horror film. A bunch of pals go to check in on their friend who seems to be going full hikikomori. When they get there, the windows are covered with newspaper, the place stinks, there’s goo on the carpet, and bags of garbage everywhere. Because it isn’t Scotland, where the immediate reaction would be, “Your place is bowfin’. Get off your arse and gie the place a wipe.”, they instead sit patiently waiting for a cup of tea.
But alas, they are not the only visitors to the home, and while it might have been easy to enter, leaving might prove more challenging. Fun classic style horror with its own touch of weird.
The Nicky Nack nails its colours to the mast as English folk horror by opening in the quintessential British pub replete with toby jugs and hanging baskets. There our hero throws back a few, and like Tam O’Shanter, prepares to make the long and lonesome journey home through the black night. Doing the starboard-side shuffle of the absolutely stotious, he makes his way down the lane, when he hears a furtive whisper, “Nicky-Nack!” Who or what is following him? Excellent short horror, both thumbs up!
Even the title gives you the wiggins. Such Small Hands is a horror short focusing on a newcomer to a orphanage who struggles to break into the collective. When they pull apart her doll, she institutes a secret nighttime game, where one girl at random will be picked to be ‘the doll’ and the rest will dress her up and tell her their secrets. An ominous sense of foreboding pervades the film, and you never feel sure when and where the lightning will strike.
The Dinner After is a horror short film about a lassie going for her weekly tea with her mum and dad. Their abject cheerfulness bounces off her hesitancy in what you could at first put down to the normal tension of adult children visiting their parents. However it soon proves that more is going on, as Angela’s sister Lauren is noticeably absent, and although it goes unmentioned, their father is constantly calling Angela by her name. What follows is a film with genuine scares, moments of “GAH!”, as well as a heartfelt portrait of trauma.
