A few reviews from the festival - SPOILERS - I give plot summaries that give away stuff that I don't think will ruin anything for you, but SPOILERS anyway.
And thanks to Laurel, from whose blog I swiped the URLs for the movies. Go see her reviews, here.
Some of the films in this year’s Science Fiction + Fantasy Short Film Festival followed a theme of mortality. I don’t just mean that people died or could die. That is a given. You have a long a life and a short death - but the latter can’t help but take up some of your head space.
For instance, in Emit, we find a world where people live backwards, the stork brings an old woman to the hospital to die - and meet the husband she’ll be married to for her entire life, along with their son and seven year old granddaughter. The husband-to-be is overwrought at meeting his bride-to-have-been, but his granddaughter reassures him.
She remembers when she met her husband - and it was wonderful.
The hospital is still a place of beginnings and endings, deaths and births. The grandfather has so much to look forward to - back on - but his children know that there’s only seven years before they have to give up their daughter forever.
And she knows it as well.
Extra points for making every woman - and some of the guys - compress their legs together when the characters were right outside a birthing room. Think about it. Yeah.
For two brothers in Red Summer, the end of the world is a long way away. That’s what their mother and grandmother are determined to convince them.
The family wile away the summer days under a red sky. The adults cling to normality, telling the boys nothing, and there aren’t many other people still around to tell them. They do decide to have Christmas in July this year. After all, why should you wait for presents?
In a poignant ending, the older brother promises to protect his little brother from catastrophe with a magic charm - just as the adults tried to protect them.
No surprises, here, but if you can’t surprise, then be honest.
When The Decelerators were children, they thought they had forever, as well. This group of twenty-somethings, feeling their lives rushing by, invent machines that let each of them freeze themselves in time at one perfect moment. The narration explains all this - running from beginning to end, enhancing the video and being enhanced by the video. Each person chooses a perfect moment to live forever and each moment chosen says everything we could know about the person.
And there was one person left behind, who didn’t believe she could find a perfect moment, now that everyone else was gone. She discarded her decelerator and resigns herself to living - what she thinks of as - a diminished life, until the time stream, itself, decides to remove her.
But not everybody takes mortality lying down.
In Drain, we see two plotlines, both disturbing.
One follows an old woman, in a wheelchair, wrinkled and worn with time, and young man, who seems to be a technician of some sort.
The other follows a baby being abducted, taken to a safe house, cared for by a woman who seems sweetness and light, and then delivered, on order, to someone else.
Then the procedure, where the old woman is zip-tied to her chair and given a bite-block.
After an induced seizure, the woman is young and vital. We know, now, what the plastic tub with tubes must contain.
If it had ended here, this would have been a fun and effective little horror story, but there was a grace note, if you will. You see, we didn’t need to know the old woman’s motive. Living in terror of death, feeling it come up on you - those would be motives enough, even if we think that nobody would do such a horrible thing.
In the final scene, we see her walking on the beach, in a bikini, smiling at the surfers.
She got young and now she’s going to go get some.
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