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’sLiving with aVisionary does this through animation, the kind that looks and feels like it was taken straight from astorybook, but with amuch 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 withgrace.
Almost as though to explicitly contrast that tale of painful dedication is ashort film about awoman who desperately wants to escape the baggage of caring for her husband. Amandine Thomas’ excellentAlbatrosswill 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 areal ache to the way she, aMexican woman married to awhite 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’sBirdieis agorgeously shot portrait of two sisters, while the mother-daughter dynamic is at the core of Ana Alejandra Alpizar’s empatheticNorheimsund. The former trades in serenity, allowing us just abrief 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 adreaminessand asobering realism to them both, but what really captivates is just how much they exist to capture what it’s like towait – for the ache to pass, for anew life to reveal itself, or for life to go on as it always has.
The romantic, or perhapsanti-romantic, shorts are just as exciting. Riley Donigan’sStairshad me in stitches as Iwatched Betsey Brown getting increasingly turned on by the notion of falling down stairs. Comparisons to David Cronenberg’sCrash 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 alittle bit sexy. Just as fun is the relationship between two actors in Matthew Puccini’sCallback – amean 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 aperfect showcase of misery loving company, as Justin H. Min and Michael Rosen are committed to servingWho’s Afraid of Virginia Woolfrealness.