Tag: Drama Short Film Review

Keith Andreen’s Mayfly lays bare the fallibility of glorious figures while graphing the ravaging work of grief. Twenty-seven minutes long, the film follows a self-help guru through his protracted, agonizing undoing at the hands of his private life. For the length of the film, it keeps him in a chokehold until he demolishes his public… Continue reading Mayfly: Damming Charisma to Look at the Wreck Behind

Magnus Lyche’s 16-minute domestic violence drama Ghoul showcases the experience from the perspective of the child in the household. His sole line of defence, his mother, mediates it for him. As she turns their environment into a digestible fairytale for him—with the concomitant expectation of eventual salvation—the film lays out the powerlessness of it all. … Continue reading Ghoul: Living in Sweetened Horror for A Mother-Son Duo

Lauren Hoover-directed Favorites is an introspective drama where the past mingles with the present in a depiction of life as we live it within our minds. The protagonist, experiencing the slow disintegration of her relationship, remembers old lovers, finding big and small reflections scattered through her history with love.  The screenwriter for the film, Mariasha… Continue reading Favorites: A List of Lost Favorites

Gabriel Caste’s Are You Awake? is an astute psychological drama that depicts routine dread with precision. Compressing time and history into a flat plane, the narrative does away with comprehensible temporality. Everything exists simultaneously and nothing has a dimension in history.  With a face reminiscent of Patricia Arquette and Robin Wright, Ellyn Jameson’s performance as… Continue reading Are You Awake?: Kinship in Dread and Paralysis in the Unnatural Everyday

Joseph Archer and Sky Cheema’s 15-minute war drama The Sikh Soldier views the bleakness of heroism in the colonial context through the story of the eponymous Sikh soldier fighting in WW1. The soldier, against his mother’s better judgement, joins the war effort with towering optimism. The dream of war glory, money, and national sovereignty feels… Continue reading The Sikh Soldier: War Heroes and Colonial Victims

Matt René’s What We Did Yesterday splits the narrative into three parts, each led by one of its three characters. The film uses visual cues and continuous movement than dialogue to develop individual narratives as the truth of the previous night waits to be seen.  Opening on a coffee table cluttered with the remnants of… Continue reading What We Did Yesterday: Replacing Vacuous Broad Strokes with Intricate Groundwork

Nejib Kthiri’s Trinou explores the inner life of a withdrawn, wheelchair-bound teenager in the Tunisian countryside, limited first by his body and then by his tense home life. With all walls closing in on him, dreams seem to be the breadth of possibilities for the boy. Over the course of the 15-minute film, Omar makes… Continue reading Trinou: A Quest for Life’s Vibrancy

Elena Viklova’s Dictionary is a brief, diagrammatic account of a relationship viewed as a progression through the seven stages of love, a Sufi concept. The protagonist, an unnamed everywoman, narrates her journey with a partner from attraction, attachment, love, reverence, worship, madness and finally, death.  The partner in question is never shown on screen, the… Continue reading Dictionary: Graphing Love in Seven Stages

When going into Katie McNeice’s Lambing one does not (but perhaps should) expect to be momentarily devastated by the fate of a lamb. An 18-minute drama about the birth of an intersex child to parents expecting a boy (the first such film in Ireland), Lambing explores the agony that parents are unnecessarily put through and… Continue reading Lambing: Parents, and the Baby They Must Choose

Patrick Ireland’s Ill Fares the Land succeeds in creating the impression of something alive out of itself. And indeed it is alive, chiefly with guilt, fear, and unceasing friction between an impoverished island and the larger world. The protagonist is a young teenage boy, who has not spoken in nearly two years, overwhelmed by worlds… Continue reading Ill Fares the Land: Guilt, Fear and Conflict in a Story (Not) About a Mermaid