The Cutting Edge is devoted to short films from local filmmakers. Don’t dismiss short films. Shorts lay future features’ foundations.
On August 25th, 2023, The Cinegroove hosted Project Screenway, an evening featuring shorts from Brown Girls Doc Mafia’s Boston members/filmmakers at Cinegroove’s principal address, 350 Newbury Street, Lower Floor, Boston. If you are interested but missed this event, there will be more opportunities in the future. In the meantime, please click on the film title to watch the shorts that are available online.
- Don’t Look Away (2023)
This twelve-minute fictional short focuses on Sheba (Ashlet Nganga), a first-generation American teenage girl, who is at a crossroads between choosing a life of joyful, self-fulfilling pursuit of art versus dispassionate academic excellence to honor her parents. Commissioned to make a Sid Davis like film to help suicidal teens and their parents, director Thato Rantao Mwosa collaborated with Teen Block to craft this relatable story in a single day. While this short’s goal was to function like an Afterschool Special and show how to spot the signs of depression, Mwosa and the Lowell teenagers repurposed and elevated the film into a universal coming of age story about becoming independent from your parents.
The story of immigrants’ children feeling the burden of their parents’ sacrifices anchors the film in authentic emotion. An innocent exchange with her friends, Carlos (Kris Claudo) and Kamisi (Tim Kimani), suggests that if expanded, their stories would be as riveting. It did strain disbelief that immigrant parents would let their daughter hang out with male friends without discouraging her. Similar to “Everything, Everywhere, All At Once” (2022), the fantastical part of the story is the parents’ reaction: their ability to perceive Sheba’s pain and choose Sheba over their dreams. The abstract art featured in the film lends credibility to the idea of Sheba as a talented artist. In the panel, Mwosa revealed that Sheba’s drawings are Mwosa’s real-life illustrations.
This six-minute documentary unfolds in Braintree, Massachusetts. Robyn Houston-Bean’s son, Nick, died of an opioid overdose. She and her daughter, Olivia, an artist, give a tour of Nick’s room, his favorite park, and his grave. The film summarizes their reactions to Nick’s overdose: their obviousness to his addiction and struggle to reconcile his potential with drug addict stereotypes. Their experience inspired the Bean family to create The Sun Will Rise Foundation, a peer grief support group for people who lost a loved one to substance use. They also participate in The Opioid Project: Changing Perceptions through Art and Storytelling by creating art to cope with grief and strengthen their bond to each other.
The filmmakers, screenwriter and anthropologist Hortense Gerardo and documentarian Monica Cohen, partner with the Bean family and these community-based organizations to destroy the stigma of an epidemic. Viewers would be more dismissive and rationalize the inevitability of criminality if their subjects looked different. Drug law guidelines coincidentally have harsher sentences for people of color who use less expensive drugs like crack versus cocaine, which fueled the elite of Wall Street, Studio 54 and other high-profile locales and are still glamorized. The ACLU also reported that Black people are arrested at a higher rate for marijuana even in areas where it is legalized. Gerardo and Cohen leverage the images of typical, ordinary white American families in a suburban neighborhood to overturn the demonized image of a drug addict and replace it with a more palatable, humanized substitute. Viewers are more likely to relate to these visuals, which may not have happened if the family and organizations featured people of color.
- Raising the Floor (2022)
Seasoned PBS documentarian Sabrina Avilés started filming this thirty-minute documentary during the pandemic in Chelsea, a city with the highest Covid-19 mortality rate in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. This GlobeDocs Film Festival winner stood out as having the best production quality, camera work, animation montages and narrative surprises. The story starts as a profile of the members in a resilient community banding together to survive. It gradually transforms into a municipality experimenting with, executing, and marketing the idea of universal basic income.
Instead of being another preach-to-the-choir documentary which will not reach any viewers not already interested in social welfare programs, it appeals to people interested in the plucky entrepreneurship of local business owners banding together with a private charity organization, La Colaborativa. It also attracts armchair policy wonks who enjoy getting a bird’s eye view of local government logistics and personalities. Think an unscripted “West Wing” scaled down to “Parks and Recreations” proportions without any hijinks. The dramatic turning point is realizing that the cost of the private actors’ effort is more expensive and less efficient than government information. While it should not, some viewers may tap out when they see the subtitles for Spanish dialogue. This documentary has the potential to convert fiscally responsible naysayers whose kneejerk reaction is to denounce handouts and turn them into advocates for public institutions to help people.
- Sandcastles (2019)
Set in Lebanon, this quotidian coming of age story revolves around Samar (Joyce Abou Jaoude), a young woman living an ordinary life with her parents, socializing with her neighbors, and getting rides to work from her boyfriend and best friend. When she deviates from her routine, her hopes and dreams take a dramatic detour from wanting to save up for a car to contemplating leaving her country. The background news reports of ISIS and Western countries’ resistance to immigrants from her region heighten the foreboding and tension though they are unrelated to the traumatic turning point.
This twenty-minute fictional short distinguished itself as the most cinematic of the evening. Sabine Bou Jaoude’s Emerson College thesis film was a European Cinematography Awards finalist. The film did not give an impression of a directorial debut though it was not perfect with the occasional lighting issues and a jarring transition. For example, Samar leaves with Rami (Ghassan Abi Aad), a neighboring boy, but returns with Tony (Elias Zayek), her boyfriend. Otherwise the camera movement and composition conveyed clear consideration for respecting the character’s interior life in choosing what to omit from the audience’s gaze. Bou Jaoude shows restraint in the pacing of the film and dialogue instead of spelling everything out or rushing to the ambiguous denouement. She leaves room for interpretation so the audience feels the similar distance to Samar after the turning point as those who know and love her but cannot reach her despite her proximity.
