Saturday, February 13, 2021

A Sister (2019)/Saria (2019)

 I couldn't find posters for either film.  Short films are hard.  You can watch both as part of the 2020 Oscar Oscar Nominated Short Films collection on Amazon, as well as the other three from the Live Action category.

An emergency operator (Veerle Baetans) must help a woman (Selma Alaoui) trapped in a car with a man (Guillaume Duhesme).  The woman cannot speak freely for fear of violence and pretends the operator is her sister.  She can only give cryptic clues about her location and answer yes or no questions as the operator puts resources out to locate the car in a race against time.

Content warning:  sexual assault

As a woman, there is so much tension and dread in this short.  It really made me want to go scrub my skin off with steel wool.  But!  I did recognize the operator as the main character from The Broken Circle Breakdown, so that was nice.


Saria (Estefanía Tellez) and her sister Ximena (Gabriela Ramírez) are stuck in a Guatemalan orphanage.    They are beaten, raped, and forced to work as slave labor, but Saria has a plan to escape.  When the time is right, they will leap off the roof onto a tree, make a run for it into the forest, and from there across 2500 km to America.  Ximena recruits her boyfriend Appo (Jorge Ávila) to rally the boys' side, and after the distraction of a riot, all the orphans make a break for freedom.  

Content warning:  sexual assault, child death

Okay, so I'm going to stop the synopsis there because it's waaaaaaaaay more cheerful to imagine they get away than tell you what actually happens after that.  This short was a total downer and I really wish it had been first, so I could have watched A Sister after.  Just... Jesus, man.  I gotta go hug a kitten now.

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