Jean Jentilet
Strong themes (from grief to motherhood, self-doubt to self-preservation) wrapped in elegant storytelling ruled the day at the tenth Sick Chicks Film Festival.
Grief is such a ubiquitous topic in so many films that it seems impossible that there can be anything else to say, but there is. In Aunque no esté contigo (Even If I’m Not With You) (dir Martha Itzel González), Marian is a tween girl who finds herself stuck between concern for her grandfather’s health, a younger sister who does not seem to understand, and her grandfather’s own sage advice that “life is to be enjoyed.” It is a convincing portrayal of that transitional period from childhood to early adolescence, when carefree naivete begins to fade.
Picking a standout from such a packed lineup is no easy task, but It Burns (dir Kate Maveau) is eleven minutes that have been turning over in my head since its final frame. A gut punch exploration of the particular kind of grief that follows a suicide, It Burns follows Irène through the stages of her grief after her partner’s death. It acknowledges grief as a condition that never really ends but only becomes a part of the bereaved even as they move on with life. Without any dialogue, It Burns efficiently leverages visual language into something brutally powerful.
Neither Aunque nor It Burns celebrate grief, exactly, but both do acknowledge the benefit of healthy grief; The Sin-Eater (dir Kelly Holmes), on the other hand, is a warning about allowing grief to become a force of destruction rather than healing. Jemima is torn over the fate of her unbaptized baby’s soul after its death, all while being relentlessly guilted for her “godlessness” by her mother-in-law. She calls on a sin eater to help assure that her child will be able to obtain posthumous forgiveness. Like It Burns, The Sin-Eater uses the aesthetics of grief rituals and dirge-like scoring to set its tone, so that when the focus of the narrative shifts, the breakaway from funereal trappings is particularly effective.
But grief isn’t the only reaction to death, and coming face-to-face with the moment of death can be a different kind of clarifying experience, as it is for Lauren in The Tensile Strength of Air (dir Shayna Connelly). After witnessing a suicide, Lauren struggles with the event and her nearness to it. There is a wonderful ambiguity throughout the film, allowing the viewer to accompany Lauren as she sorts things out. Tensile Strength was one of the most stylistically interesting films of the day, playing with layers of space and perception to render Lauren’s inner mental and emotional processes.
In contrast Tensile Strength, where the main character calibrates her understanding of herself (in large part) against her relationships with those closest to her, Specchio (dir Daniele Fabietti) shows a woman desperate to hold an identity apart from the people she interacts with most through the false intimacy of staged performance as they deconstruct her. Specchio is sparse, and this sparseness allows the protagonist’s emotional state to remain at the forefront and urgent.
Specchio (2024) di Daniele Fabietti, trailer
Uploaded by Daniele Fabietti on 2024-12-12.
Feeling a little less refined than either Specchio or Tensile Strength, Humedad (Damp) (dir Julieta Quiroga) still feels like a spiritual cousin to the latter piece, and deals with a similar sort of inner reckoning. During intense rains Napo’s apartment becomes inundated with water that appears and disappears and reappears with no rhyme or reason. He keeps on his television, receives money from his parents, and gets a series of phone calls from no one, but his only in-person interaction is a visit from his girlfriend, whom he soon finds himself inexplicably cut off from. The piece leaves the audience with much less hope for Napo than Tensile Strength leaves for Lauren.
Two other films—MYRIAD and Sand Forest—employ more direct narrative techniques to explore the malleability of identity as a coping mechanism. MYRIAD (dir Grayson Bane) is a fun ride where the protagonist uses different aspects of her personality to frustrate an unpleasant interrogation. It plays as touching on DID; however, during a panel discussion, director Grayson Bane explained that the idea for the short came to her while she was having a conversation with herself to practice different accents, which makes sense: what is identity if not a conversation with Self about Self?
Sand Forest (dir Nathalia Rangel, Keila Mora) is an animated piece about a desert fox looking for a job in the forest but is turned down by all the native fox business owners. On the verge of giving up, he is inspired by a picture of his parents to try again and realizes that he may have to sacrifice his own outer identity to survive. This was a nice reprieve in the middle of a lot of heaviness.
More on the nose (in many ways) was Metamorphosis (dir Meryem Jeferli), a dance depicting the transformation of an angel to be with a siren that he has fallen in love with. This hits a sweet spot with its abstraction, and while it used the idea of changing identity as a kind of death, its narrative drive was a demonstration of sacrifice, another frequent theme wound through some of the strongest films of the day.
