The saddest shorts are sometimes the most absorbing, and two of the best of the festival focused on the weight of navigating elderly care and dementia through wildly different approaches. Stephen P. Neary’s Living with a Visionary does this through animation, the kind that looks and feels like it was taken straight from a storybook, but with a much heftier tale than any children’s story. With James Cromwell’s voice as narrator, the beauty of coping through fantasy and the heartbreak that comes with watching an older couple navigate the harsh realities of illness and the medical industry are both emphasized with grace.
Almost as though to explicitly contrast that tale of painful dedication is a short film about a woman who desperately wants to escape the baggage of caring for her husband. Amandine Thomas’ excellent Albatross will perhaps rub some the wrong way in how bluntly it confronts the exhaustion of watching someone fade away slowly, but its lead, Georgina Saldaña Wonchee, sells the pain she’s going through impressively. There’s a real ache to the way she, a Mexican woman married to a white man, has not only lost herself in the process of caregiving, but also lost the ties to her culture, forcing her to question whether her love has congealed into hatred.
Familial relations were everywhere in the shorts programs. Praise Odigie Paige’s Birdie is a gorgeously shot portrait of two sisters, while the mother-daughter dynamic is at the core of Ana Alejandra Alpizar’s empathetic Norheimsund. The former trades in serenity, allowing us just a brief glance at what life is like for African immigrants living in 1970s Virginia, while the latter embraces the talkativeness of Cuban women who are willing and able to do anything to survive and care for each other. There’s a dreaminess and a sobering realism to them both, but what really captivates is just how much they exist to capture what it’s like to wait – for the ache to pass, for a new life to reveal itself, or for life to go on as it always has.
The romantic, or perhaps anti-romantic, shorts are just as exciting. Riley Donigan’s Stairs had me in stitches as I watched Betsey Brown getting increasingly turned on by the notion of falling down stairs. Comparisons to David Cronenberg’s Crash and the way it indulges in both the humor and horror of watching people self-harm for sexual pleasure are inevitable and rightfully so. It’s brutal, from the committed performance down to some exquisite make-up work, endlessly amusing, and, if I’m being honest, just a little bit sexy. Just as fun is the relationship between two actors in Matthew Puccini’s Callback – a mean little short about what it’s like to truly believe you’re the better person (and, in this case, performer) in your relationship. Any initial sweetness falls away quickly as the passive aggression takes over, but it’s a perfect showcase of misery loving company, as Justin H. Min and Michael Rosen are committed to serving Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf realness.
