Jean Jentilet
The day’s feature film, Baby Fever (dir Nupur Chitalia, Pascale Potvin) encompass all the themes of the day, at least tangentially. After moving to a new community with her husband, James, and finding herself pregnant, Lila interviews with the local mothers’ group, a prestigious club led by mommy influencer Trish (in a tooth-for-tooth performance by Zoe Georgaras). Predictably, the “perfect mom” appears to not actually like children that much and is primarily concerned with her media image. Still, the group is important to Lila because she has become estranged from her own family due largely to her marriage to James and their choice to move. After Lila miscarries, she succumbs to paranoia (or not) and hallucinations as she and James blame each other for the end of the pregnancy. Meanwhile Trish, in a showing of compassion, allows Lila to handle the group’s social media and attend their outings (even if she’s not officially a member.) Lila cannot find answers about exactly how her pregnancy ended, and every attempt to do so widens the gulf between her and James, The mother’s group, and Trish, become more attractive as a last refuge.Vicious and self-aware, Baby Fever deals with loss, the pressures of marriage and motherhood, and the imprisonment of expectations.
In We Need to Talk About Balloons (dir Jennifer Bonior), another Mommy influencer (Chloé) is intent on using her daughter, Dani, as a prop for her social media image, with no concern for her Dani’s clearly and frequently stated desire to forge her own “brand” as a magician. It ends badly for Mom. I loved this piece for adding a new phrase to my lexicon that I will use at my first opportunity: “a glitter bomb of a person” to describe the performatively cheerful.
The cleverly titled and hilariously executed Self Clean (dir Jules Santamauro) finds Carrie fed up with her boyfriend’s self-righteous judgment and attempts to wrangle her back into an approved set of behaviors after a night out. Similarly, in A Princess’s Plea (dir Brooke Thronton, Madison Hubler), Nice Guy knight Sir Vince shows up to rescue Princess Circe from a dragon, expecting to bring home Circe as bride, because he did everything—except respect Circe as her own person. bush (dir Emma Mazurek) mines the uncertainty that can come with a new relationship for a great bit of body horror. Alma is nervous about the prospect of meeting her boyfriend’s family, and her insecurities are amplified by comments made about by her boyfriend’s mother and sister about her skin and hair. This is the same fear of judgment by other women that is woven throughout Baby Fever.
On the darker side, Blood, Sweat and Tears (dir Hannah Perry Shepherd) dives deep into the despair of a lonely housewife. While a 1930s radio program about how to be a good wife and mother plays in the background, the main character goes about her day, dutifully caring for a crying baby and a seemingly indifferent husband. One terrible act of desperation finally snaps her husband out of his complacency, but maybe too late. The use of the radio program and Marilyn Monroe adjacent imagery to imply some state of perfect womanhood that never really existed is inspired.
Ana of Calle Cuatro (dir Kailin Wang) has a less dire vision of confounding expectations, told by Ana as recounting a dream that she had on the eve of her quinceañera of returning to her family’s ancestral home. There she has a series of conversations with the spirits of her grandmother, her mother, and a great great grandmother (who might have seen herself in Blood, Sweat and Tears), all imparting their wisdom to her to take into womanhood. In doing so, each woman offers Ana a different take on what choice as a woman means and what traits will serve her best as she makes her way in the world.
What choice means in both Blood and Ana is survival, literally and spiritually, under the weight of expectations. But people are often the architects of their own undoing, as we see in FearISH (dir Soheila Madadi), about a little fish who becomes paralyzed by self-doubt as he tries to survive a new arrival in the aquarium. FearISH is a simple piece, and more poignant for it.
It’s not clear what would have changed the outcome in FearISH, but from SHRIEEK (dir Marcelle Marais), it would seem to be some combination of self-doubt running into the wall of something beyond the simple desire to live: the desire to live with dignity. This is not a trivial distinction in the best of circumstances, and certainly not in an abusive home such as the one depicted in SHRIEEK. As a metaphor for the redemption of self-worth, SHRIEEK gives the viewer something more satisfying.
The push against victimization occurs over the course of several films. The Girl (dir Mandy Kowalski) smacks of Thelma and (small) Louise but with a higher purpose. Home Run (Julián Acosta Vera), about a softball player being stalked one night after practice, also feels familiar, but in a way that makes it more enjoyable. There are some small editing flourishes here that punch up the whole piece. A sort of reclamation by proxy takes place in Touched (dir Rana Rachid) from the perspective of Bee, who gathers information from objects by touching them (though we learn in a conversation with her coffee mug that not everything talks). There was a lot going on in the background here, so attentive viewers are rewarded.
The head-on approach doesn’t always end up in a stronger, better place. Swallows (dir Queenie Zhang), is about Naomi, whose childhood friend Peggy goes missing one day while the girls are playing. Obsessed into adulthood with finding Peggy, Naomi is set on using her job as a journalist to bring attention to Peggy’s case. The atmosphere here was great, with recurring imagery dropping into well-chosen moments. In contrast, The Weight of the World (dir Avery Elizabeth Layton) offers a fantasy of hope when a museum worker takes refuge in Greek mythology after being assaulted on her way home from work, calling on her inner strength (as Athena) to exact revenge against her assaulter.
One Lonely Heart (dir Jo Garrett) plays a quick game of subverting audience expectations when a plumber shows up on an emergency call to help a woman get her engagement ring out of the kitchen sink drain. It’s another fun one, and a good companion piece to Girl’s Night Out (dir Chantal Claret), when no good deed goes unpunished. An unsettling, sterile uncanniness runs throughout Girl’s Night. (This is a good thing.) Girl’s Night does pull at another thread: there was a lot of consumption going on throughout most of SCFFF’s offerings. While mostly a device, or often a side commentary, it still loomed over the day. Sometimes, it was central point (Tasty Tongue), if not the point itself (HUNGER).
Tasty Tongue (dir Pearl Zheng) touches on a few of the day’s other themes as well. A-Zhe, whose life is a collection of disappointments, is constantly assailed by the voice of his mother (either over the phone, by notes, or through a door) serving as a reminder that he is stuck on the precipice of what he imagines successful adulthood to be (a girlfriend, self-sufficiency). At work he is tormented for his awkwardness and (surprise) his relationship with his mother. When his desire to lash out is taken up by a woman from a painting that he sees in a restaurant where he ate tongue—“the most delicious part of any animal”—he finds that there is no getting away from himself. A lot of small, smart ideas come together here to treat a familiar theme in a novel way, and with a sense of care about the execution. In particular, the use of tongues as the salient object provides fertile ground for a few different tricks that worked well in being both unsettling and darkly amusing.
Another highlight of the day, HUNGER (Monaye Moyes) follows Sofia as she tries to deal with the end of a relationship through both an in-person therapist and a therapy podcast (that the in-person therapist hates.) A light, funny piece with great performances all around (especially Christine Celozzi as the therapist), it works as a spot-on commentary about co-dependancy.
A few pieces didn’t fall so neatly into easy themes: Reddening (dir Sinem Kayacan) was a visually interesting allegory—though there was a mother figure applying sunscreen, but that was just a happy coincidence. From:Nora (dir Paula Benu) is a short about a young woman in a long-distance relationship with a man who doesn’t respond to her letters as faithfully as she responds to his. After consulting with the tarot, the mailman, and a round of hypnosis, Nora realizes that she’s had her answer all along. The universe hears you (dir Kateryna Statsenko), about a minor Christmas miracle, was fun and relatable. The Man Who Loved Flowers (dir Tracey Hague), takes on the Stephen King short story of the same name, and dealt fairly successfully with the extra-narrative information that often doesn’t translate well from King’s works to film.
After a panel discussion about the effects of AI on creativity, The Power of Ink (dir Karen Elaine Lutz) asked broader questions of how, exactly, do humans put the AI genie back in the bottle, and when is it too late?
In Wilted (dir Marrin Lynn Haskell), Gene becomes frustrated that his guests do not have the same vision for his tea party as he does. There are some fine creepy touches here: Gene has inherited a collection of odd off-putting things from his grandmother, such as a jar of teeth too big to be for the Tooth Fairy. In the end, the real question (in whatever phrasing one may choose) is: what kind of person gets this serious about tea with friends? It’s a question worth asking. Urgent, even.
