Murmurs often contain the most moving words.
Illuminating the discourse of the marginalized and forgotten has become a tradition for deadCenter’s Unheard Voices Shorts. 2019’s festival seems to cultivate the emotional value of such brief films, assembling eight exceptionally different, yet undeniably striking works spanning a myriad of genre and disposition.
Alexia Oldini and Steven Gray’s Grace, the collection’s gut-wrenching opener, trails the titular black youth (Shenell Edmonds) as she is forcibly evicted from her home and forced into a public shelter. Stricken by the turmoil of her displacement and a whitewashed system that seeks only to force compliance, rather than offer any meaningful sympathy, Grace is spurred into an all-too-familiar narrative of racial violence and brutality. The film is as beautiful as it is jarring, capturing a notion of pain and loss in six minutes that few pieces accomplish at feature-length.
James Latimer’s Lady Samurai offers a glimpse into the artistry of Kaori Kawabuchi, a modern samurai, performance artist, and motion capture actor made famous through her work with the Final Fantasy franchise. The short provides a face to a figure rarely scene, capturing the physicality of Kawabuchi’s art within a historic Japanese temple. The setting serves appropriate conduit for the centuries-old practices she has sought to preserve, an ambiance heightened by perhaps the collections most intense score.
Sam Kressner’s Self Tape is reminiscent of The Neon Demon in subject matter, and unfortunately, his film comes off a bit blinded as a result. The piece, to a certain extent, feels like it successfully identifies its subject, the manipulation and of objectification of women in the entertainment industry, but never really posits a thesis with much weight. Martha Magruder proves to be the piece’s shining beacon, her range saving the film from being a wash.
Gan de Lange’s Hebrew film Mother Of, on the contrary, offers an experience that cannot be shaken. Taking notes from the cinematography of Son of Saul, the short offers an uncomfortably intimate look at a mother in the wake of sexual violence, forced into making a critical decision in order to protect her daughter. The film is a bit difficult to follow in certain moments, but the disorientation this style brings serves only to strengthen the emotional blow it ultimately inflicts.
Amy Bench’s A Line Birds Cannot See and Adrian Liang’s The Company You Keep are appropriate companion pieces to one another as they literally animate victims of harsh circumstance, adopting the notion of “unheard voices” almost verbatim. In the former, a young woman recalls her journey to America as she was separated from her mother and forced into child sex slavery on the brink of starvation, saved by a sparse act of kindness. In the latter, a black inmate recalls how, in 1984, he and his three friends were shot multiple times by a man ultimately lauded as a hero, claiming they were resolved to rob him. Both are powerful, and their chosen mediums to more to frame the tales, rather than compromise them.
Nicole Perlman’s The Slows feels like a missing Black Mirror episode, detailing a world where sexual reproduction has grown obsolete, the bulk of humanity being accelerated from infancy to maturity in a matter of moments. One journalist (Annet Mahendru) seeks to document the final vestige of old humanity, a community composed of “the Slows,” people that have refused to adopt the whims of a science-driven and clinical society. Perlman expertly weaves a commentary of paternity and stringent human utility into a breathtaking allegory.
The Unheard Voices Shorts concludes with Sandra Winther’s Lowland Kids, a documentary capturing the final moments before the permanent relocation of America’s first climate change refugees. Unable to reasonably stave the effects of rising sea levels and punishing rainfall, one atypical family of Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana provides the requiem to the land they sought desperately to maintain. The short is telling of our current condition, framing a clear consequence of the nature of modern production. Given the very recent flooding of Tulsa and other regions of Oklahoma, this final entry into the collection could not have been timelier.
