A cyclist rides along an eerily empty Hollywood Boulevard. Souvenir shops are closed, the streets are nearly deserted, and the avenue’s most iconic landmarks are shuttered. She passes the Walk of Fame, the Chinese Theatre, and then the Dolby Theatre, the birthplace of the Oscars. They’ve all vanished, notes the narrator, Australian actress Cate Blanchett, winner of two golden statuettes. The drone footage is perhaps the most striking testament to the heart of Western cinema, battered by the coronavirus—a snapshot of a place paralyzed and forever altered.
This seems to have been, in part, the idea of American director Ana Lily Amirpour after being commissioned to make a short film from her home in Los Angeles. A premise she fulfills in a way, as she herself is the cyclist who stars in the ten-minute film, Ride It Out, and much of the film’s footage was shot from the sky in mid-May. As noted at the end, it was made “following the local health authority’s protocols.”
This is the same requirement that brought together 16 other filmmakers for Homemade, the collection of short films premiering today on Netflix. Led by Pablo and Juan de Dios Larraín of Fábula, along with Italian director Lorenzo Mieli (The Apartment), the series is a journey through directors’ homes, autobiographical exercises, and stories crafted at breakneck speed. Comedies, dramas, and tales bordering on horror and fantasy. Watching them straight through takes two and a half hours, and the experience likely takes on a greater urgency for viewers still in lockdown and observing the easing of restrictions with a degree of detachment.
French filmmaker Ladj Ly (Les Misérables) reflects on the impossibility of leaving his home, noting that Paris spent 55 days in quarantine and that his film focuses on one of the neighborhoods hardest hit by the disease. Also in Europe, in a short film by Italian filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino, miniature figures of Pope Francis and Queen Elizabeth II meet in a fictional Vatican to discuss watching The Crown, touching tangentially on celibacy and their perspective on a world under lockdown.
It includes a couple of striking cameos, but everything was done in a home-based style. It features the voices of actors Javier Cámara and Olivia Williams as the protagonists, as well as the valuable contribution of the director’s own family (of The Great Beauty and The Young Pope fame), whom he thanks in the credits for their support.
A refuge from the pandemic, the family unit is crucial for the filmmakers who created their short films in response to social distancing measures. Of the 17 titles in the collection, at least a handful feature their own children at the heart of the story. Portraits ranging from toddlers to teenagers, like the daughter of Scottish director David Mackenzie (Nothing to Lose), who, nearing her birthday in quarantine, laments, “I’m not ready to be 16.”
Peter Sarsgaard stars in Penelope, directed by his wife, Maggie Gyllenhaal.
Kristen Stewart, the upcoming star of Pablo Larraín’s film about Princess Diana, directs herself in Crickets, where, from her home in Los Angeles, she plays a woman who just wants some rest. A true testament to the accumulated stress since March.
Living through confinement isn’t easy, but there’s room for comedy to seep in. Larraín himself imagines a man (Jaime Vadell) who contacts a past love via video call, a woman played by Argentinian actress Mercedes Morán, who then gives way to other Chilean figures, such as Delfina Guzmán and Coca Guazzini. Also related to technology, Zambian-Welsh director Rungano Nyoni (I Am Not a Witch) creates the story of a couple’s breakup in an apartment and chooses to tell it through chats, emojis, and photos.
Perhaps the one who most radically captures and transforms the conditions we are currently experiencing is Maggie Gyllenhaal. From the perspective of a man (the actor Peter Sarsgaard, her husband) and through radio broadcasts, the actress from The Deuce portrays a dying world, where millions of deaths result from a catastrophe that engulfs the solar system.
No less sophisticated is Sebastián Lelio’s work, a musical starring Amalia Kassai (Helga & Flora), a woman who navigates the confines of domesticity, singing about the delirium of confinement, while a discontent simmers that transcends the pandemic.
Sebastián Lelio directs Amalia Kassai in his musical Algoritmo.
From his home, the director enlisted German musician Matthew Herbert, with whom he had already worked on his last three films, including A Fantastic Woman, and his regular editor, Soledad Salfate. Salfate also edited the short film by Mexican filmmaker Natalia Beristáin, shot in Mexico City and centered on her daughter, who sings Violeta Parra’s “La Petaquita” and gazes at her friends in the distance.
From the Japanese city of Nara to New York, many were filmed on cell phones, several reveal a moment in their creators’ lives, and all attempt to connect with the feeling the world is experiencing. Fear, as Cate Blanchett says in the short film she participates in, “a disorienting sensation that gives you perspective.”
Text Fron “La Tercera” by Gonzalo Valdivia 2020