Seven short films, all made during lockdown, comprise The Year of the Everlasting Storm, which opens with a Robert Bresson quote that serves as a thesis for the project: “One does not create by adding but by taking away.” The shorts range from documentary to speculative fiction, and despite working with minimal resources, each filmmaker turns in a work that’s clearly aligned with their established aesthetic and thematic interests.
The majority of the shorts, regardless of where they were made, capture some aspect of pandemic life that will be intimately felt by most viewers. Anthony Chen’s The Break Away, set in Wuhan during the start of the coronavirus outbreak, understands how fear of the unknown can rewire relationship dynamics. Alternately comical and somber, the short traces the experience of a young married couple (Dongyu Zhou and Yu Zhang) struggling to balance their work and their private lives, namely their obligations to their young son. The couple is frustrated above all else by stasis, increasingly growing sick of one another and only seeming to finding calm by indulging in cigarettes out on their balcony.
Dominga Sotomayor’s Sín Titulo, 2020, set almost entirely on a farm outside Santiago, at once contrasts and harmonizes with that moment of calm. At one point, its protagonist (Francisca Castillo) is given permission to deliver necessities to people in the city, including one of her daughters, via a basket that can be hoisted up through windows and balconies. Where the other shorts largely gaze outward into the world from high vantage points, this one looks upward, and instead of stressing the isolation of lockdown, it emphasizes the ways in which individuals, family and strangers alike, can form social connections in the midst of a crisis.
Made in collaboration with investigators from Forensic Architecture, Laura Poitras’s investigative documentary short Terror Contagion draws a disturbing line between communication in the age of the coronavirus to the consequent possibility of surveillance. Delving into the phone-hacking spyware sold by Israeli cyberweapons company NSO Group Technologies to international governments to target dissidents and undesirables, the short has the tenor of a horror movie. Its frequent shots of computer screens filled with video-chat thumbnails bring to mind Unfriended, while the glimpses of police procedure outside her downtown New York City apartment in the midst of last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests ominously convey how law enforcement asserts it power through the exploitation of crisis.
Another nonfiction short, Malik Vitthal’s Little Measures, is also in conversation with the issues that the Black Lives Matter movement is making visible. The film follows the efforts of a single father to remain connected to his children in foster care, after his trial date to regain custody of them is indefinitely postponed due to the justice system effectively going into lockdown. Where Poitras’s short sees the pandemic as accelerating America’s turn toward a dystopian police state, Vitthal’s short is focused on the more quotidian frustrations of a legal bureaucracy that’s become increasingly oriented toward demoralization in the past two years.
The uneasy tone of Poitras’s short is mirrored in this anthology’s only misfire, Dig Up My Darling. Attempting a more speculative approach, David Lowery turns stretches of Texas highway and abandoned subdivision homes into something that feels post-apocalyptic, where cars and mobile phones still exist but people seem to have reverted to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. The story follows a woman (Catherine Machovsky) who finds old letters leading her to a dead relative whose body was stolen by his father when the hospital would not release corpses for funerals amid pandemic fears. There’s a haunting western flavor to the short, with the protagonist literally using a hand-drawn map to track down a grave under a lone oak tree out in the desert, but it lacks for a strong thematic and emotional payoff.
The two shorts that bookend The Year of the Everlasting Storm are the ones that feel like the most daringly auteurist statements. Jafar Panahi’s contribution, Life, was shot inside his high-rise flat, where his pet iguana hungrily stares at pigeons nesting on the balcony. From the start, the short feels like a lighthearted spin on the more harrowing films that the director made a decade ago under house arrest, before ending with the profoundly touching moment of the director’s mother, who arrives at the apartment at the start of the short in a full anti-contamination suit, warming up to the iguana. Emotional over being separated from members of her family, especially her grandchildren, the old woman acts out a curious iteration of the old adage “if you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with.”
Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s closing film, the telling titled Night Colonies, takes that moment of connection to the natural world and expands it into a work mostly composed of close-ups on a bed in a Thai jungle cabin that’s swarming with bugs that have flocked to the rig of fluorescent bulbs that Joe and his crew erected for the short. Joe’s films have long dealt with the manner in which the natural world still exerts its pull on even the most urbanized humans, and the soundscape of buzzing insects and rumbling thunder from a passing storm is at once unnerving and oddly soothing, a reminder that something as shocking to our senses as a global pandemic is just one step in an ongoing cycle of transience and rebirth.
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