Ain't No Mercy for Rabbits
2020 · 16m · USA
Directed by Aliza Brugger
Genres: drama, sci-fi, western
Tones: dark, melancholic, tense
In a near-future world where drinkable water has nearly vanished, seven-year-old Roan must learn to fend for herself when her ailing grandmother can no longer care for her.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Climate-dystopia western with a seven-year-old protagonist should be insufferable genre cosplay, but Brugger commits to the weirdness without winking—the parched landscape becomes genuinely unsettling precisely because she refuses to make it palatably allegorical.
A formally disciplined genre hybrid that honors both the western's compositional tradition and sci-fi's world-building rigor; the melancholic tonal control suggests a filmmaker thinking deliberately about how image and sound construct abandonment.
The film hinges on a single structural choice—letting the child's silence and observation carry more weight than exposition or sentiment—and that restraint transforms a high-concept premise into something intimate and brutally credible.
Reviews
Festival programmers strongly believed in the film and its ability to have a lasting impact on its audience.
Festivals
- Torino Film Festival 2021
- Montclair Film Festival 2021
- In the Palace International Short Film Festival 2021
- Female Eye Film Festival 2021, Best International Short Film
- Queens World Film Festival 2022
- Omaha Film Festival 2022