A few shorts

Yesterday I caught a shorts program at SFIAAFF called "The World, Complicated." It was my first shorts program in a long time, because there are always so many features to see.

Whether you'd like to see a feature-length version is certainly not the only measure of a short film, but two of the standouts in this program met that mark for me. The Last Chip, an Australian film by Heng Tang, joins three elderly Chinese-Australian women on a casino run. It's visually stunning and well-crafted overall, though I felt it went a little overboard dramatically at one point. I wanted to know more about the backstory of these characters, all of whom were brilliantly played.

Windowbreaker, directed by Tze Chun, is set in a changing Boston suburb torn by sometimes unspoken conflict among Caucasian, Chinese, and Vietnamese residents. The video, credited to "The Complications," hints at the complexity of the situation and raises questions that almost beg to be explored at feature length. Thankfully, student filmmaker Chun displays the delicate touch that could make such a movie work.

The other entry that stood out was Going Home, an intimate first-person documentary about another traumatic parting in a Vietnamese refugee family that has been separated many times before. Director Hung Nguyen's camera drinks it all in, in takes that are extraordinarily long and well-shot for interviews with untrained subjects. This one is fascinating and a pleasure to watch all by itself, the perfect length at 20 minutes.