WFF '23: Strangers in a Strange Land

I admit that I am fairly ambivalent about short films. Usually I watch the credits of one roll and wish that it had been longer, feel that certain ideas had been given short shrift, and so on and so forth. This is usually with narratives. They feel like there was a feature film's worth of plot, characterization, and thematic development in the filmmaker's head but it all got compacted into 15 minutes.

I generalize here and will admit that I have seen shorts that I thought were wonderful. Despite my ambivalence, I try to catch at least one program of shorts at the Wisconsin Film Festival every year. And so I did this year with Strangers in a Strange Land, a collection of 6 short films that screened last night.

Unwritten History of Wisconsin, the only documentary in the bunch, was fairly simply stylistically. Director Emma Chang joined some animated bits with shots of Wisconsin scenery as a Hmong immigrant tells his tale of escaping Laos as the Vietnam War wound down until he finally ended up in Milwaukee.

Saltwater came next. Director Sachin Bhargava is Madison native living in Los Angeles. Here he gives us a moving portrait of a father and son relationship over the course of, oh, 20-some odd years. When the son is young, the father is unable to enact the strict discipline that the mother wants him to. Instead he has the boy slice onions.

This mildly punitive kitchen work evolves through the years into something pensive, perhaps meditative, and it takes on a whole new aspect as father and son cope with the loss of their wife and mother.

Prairie Girls by Benett Holgerson added some levity to the proceedings. Two women from the 19th century wake up to find themselves (and their bed sans mattress) in a field next to the ruins of a farmstead.  They run into a voiceless birdwatcher and a pair of Albanians who don't exactly look like they're on the up and up.

It was fun to see the Matz farmstead ruins out by Cross Plains, WI, just west of Madison, on the big screen. There was some good humor and Holgerson, who was also cinematographer, used some short lenses which made for some nice visuals.

As the laughs faded to black, Emilie Upczak stepped up to tug at your heart strings again with Silt. Upczak's website says this is a proof of concept short for a feature length narrative.

A young Navajo woman has lost her beloved aunt and so she travels to Mexico to wander the lands that her aunt had taken her to as a girl. Presumably, the aunt and the trip inspired the woman to become a botanist.

Mostly a paean to family, but underneath there's a timely environmental message.

Noise by Wisconsin native Julian Castronovo injected humor into the proceedings once again. A rather slimy white director is auditioning East Asian women for a role in his movie. The role is of a robotic servant who says nothing and whose only "dialogue" is a scream.

I liked the rather stark cinematography with the static camera but moving elements within the frame. It was also rather funny.

The night would end with another affecting tale of family and emotional turmoil. After Sunset, Dawn Arrives by Andy Yi Li profiles Wan, an older widower who finds himself attracted to a much younger man who teaches dance. Wan mourns the death of his wife while finding some freedom in it as he is finally able to come out of the closet.

Six shorts enter, one short leave!

I really loved the cinematography of Prairie Girls while Saltwater and After Sunset, Dawn Arrives forcefully tugged at my heart strings. But Unwritten History of Wisconsin felt least constrained by the short film format. I adored the animation and the movie's overall homemade aesthetic. It felt like it needed 12 minutes to say what it wanted to say. No more, no less.