Reflective Encounters

“Morrie Tan’s short is an impressively intimate and personal look at prisons and families. Atmosphere is created through dedicated attention to precise details: the texture of waiting room walls, the creaking hinges of heavy doors. Sets are created with meticulous care, revealing a filmmaker painfully familiar with this environment. A sense of place is also articulated through a close, observant camera. Repeated shots of the daughter’s hands, clasped in anxiety, recall the detail-obsessed French director Robert Bresson.

Tan’s short operates as both a personal reflection on family, and a larger inquiry into how we are distanced from each other. Technology, often sold on promises of further socialising, is here revealed as nothing but a hindrance. The prison’s faulty internet connection leads to an achingly tense scene, executed with precise, careful editing. It’s this specific sense of pain which elevates the film into being universal, even to viewers unaffected by incarceration. Both characters are made with felt-like materials, a technique which creates an eccentric ‘boiling’ effect on their skin’s surface. Tan joins a roster of animators who have fallen for the strange qualities of felted puppets, such as Anna Mantzaris (Enough, 2017), or Emma de Swaef and Marc James Roels (This Magnificent Cake!, 2018).”

— Chris Childs