1, 2, 3, All Eyes on Me
2020 · 31m · USA
Directed by Emil Gallardo
Genres: drama
An elementary school art teacher tries to shepherd her students through a crisis when a shooting unfolds on campus. Told entirely from inside the classroom, the film builds dread through sound, perspective, and the quiet, focused heroism of a teacher under impossible pressure.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone's going to call this 'responsible' or 'restrained,' which means they're missing the genuinely perverse gambit here—Gallardo turns a school shooting into a formal chamber piece, betting everything on the idea that what you *don't* see is scarier than the thing itself, and he's infuriatingly right.
The film's lineage traces clearly to post-Haneke restraint and the sound-design rigor of someone who understands that dread is architectural; Gallardo's refusal to cut away, to sensationalize, to show us anything but a teacher's sustained composure becomes the moral and formal spine the film hangs on.
The masterstroke is the breathing exercise—that single pedagogical moment where the teacher's profession becomes the tool of survival, turning an ordinary classroom skill into the film's emotional and thematic anchor, and everything else moves in orbit around it.
Reviews
The horror of depicting what this violent event must look like is sickening, but it's very well done here and can serve to raise awareness.
Farelle Walker, who plays the teacher, gives a beautiful performance.
Festivals
- HollyShorts Film Festival 2020, Grand Prix Best Film
- Austin Film Festival 2020, Jury Award
- NY Latino Film Festival 2020, Best Short
- Salute Your Shorts Film Festival 2020