BEFORE THE WINTER | Omeleto

Описание: A young girl is troubled.


May is a quiet, reserved middle schooler who keeps a diary. When her diary is taken away by her classmate, Juan, she tussles with him and gets in trouble. Her diary is then confiscated by her teacher, Mrs. Lee, who can't help but take a peek and is drawn in by May's descriptions of her difficult home life, rendered in poetic and devastating detail.

Through the pages of the diary, Mrs. Lee discovers the family's herculean efforts to care for their sick family cat, with May's mother working night shifts to earn the money for their growing medical bills. When those efforts go beyond the pale and May becomes distressed, Mrs. Lee feels the need to intervene but discovers something sadder and darker than initially thought.

Directed by Juan Zuloaga Eslait and written by Flora Wengu Jiang, this award-winning short drama is a slow burn at first, chronicling the understated yet heartwrenching surfaces of a young girl's family life as she records her impressions and reflections in the pages of her journal. But as it pokes beneath the sad innocence of May's story via a well-meaning teacher's desire to protect her pupil, the film gains in propulsion as it unlocks more unsettling dimensions of the truth -- and interrogates the assumption that we can ever truly know another person's reality to begin with.

The storytelling falls on the side of restraint and understatement, from the chilly, melancholic colors and lighting of the cinematography to the observational eye for details and gestures. Shots are sometimes framed obliquely, leaving details off the margins and emphasizing an off-kilter rhythm in the editing. Yet there's a dreamlike fluidity as the storytelling oscillates between Mrs. Lee's handling of the diary and the story unfolding on its pages. These pages track an increasingly difficult family situation, as May and her mother cope with a sick pet, with an increasing level of sacrifice on May's mother's part.

Details accumulate, but so does a sense of mystery and even dread, and coping with an impending loss of a beloved pet becomes something stranger and more disturbing. What keeps us anchored in this sleight-of-hand is young actor Venice Wong's darkly luminous performance as May; she captures her character's shame, vulnerability and growing anxiety, as well as the difficult efforts to go about her daily life as if nothing is happening. As Mrs. Lee reaches the shocking revelation that May's mother is selling her body to pay for medical care, she thinks she finally understands what's happened and tries to help, only to realize the truth is much sadder than she thought.

BEFORE THE WINTER ends with one final important plot point, one that another character uncovers and then hides. In the end, the whole truth is known, but only in fragments that are never pieced together by the characters. The burden of that truth is borne only by the audience, privileged with a perspective only possible through the unique plasticity of cinematic storytelling. We reach the end of this disconcerting narrative rattled, wondering just how far we will go to end suffering and how much we truly know of people -- and if, indeed, we want to know everything like we often think we do.


BEFORE THE WINTER. Courtesy of Juan Zuloaga Eslait at https://zuesfilms.com.