My first in person screening is a double bill with a short preceding a mid length feature. These are both Wavelength selections so any interpretation seem like reaches, but I have big hands. EVENTIDE is the short. Polish women try to light up portions of a rocky Swedish beach with the flashlight app on their phones. They’re either doing a bad job at looking for a dead body or a they’re looking for a treasure and they’re way to relaxed about it. Dusk turns into night, these women keeping their eyes on the ground as the stars shine. I’m allowed to interpret this half hour short any way I want to, and it’s an, ugh, sublime contemplation of death as well as rivaling ancient philosophies.
Night then turns into morning for this double bill’s feature, Horse Opera, where a woman is listening to an audiobook about a New Yorker’s memoir and recording her own stilted delivery of that audiobook. She uses different visuals to accompany this layered audio, including her own dirty country farmhouse where they’re a bookcase next to a sink. Most of the visuals though are of the complex ecosystem of her farm which she normally uses to care for free range horses, and the camera sometimes closes up on these horses vacating their bladders. I tried to give this the benefit of the doubt that this posits the inherent separateness of humans and nature, but urine leaving horses’ bodies feel egregious. Bad movies make me prudish.
- Release Date: 9/9/2022