Cutaway
2014 · 7m · Canada
Directed by Kazik Radwanski
Genres: drama, experimental
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Told entirely through close-up details of a young man's hands and the objects he touches, Cutaway follows a phase of his life as he works as a labourer, pursues relationships with women, and comes to terms with a sudden, life-changing loss. The viewer never sees his face or learns his name.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Radwanski's refusal to show the face is a bold middle finger to empathy-through-identification, but the conceit outlasts its subversive juice around minute three—what starts as a constraint-as-concept becomes just a constraint.
A formally rigorous meditation on embodiment and absence that positions itself alongside the structuralist cinema of the '70s, though the emotional payoff never quite justifies the austere methodology.
That decision to let the hands do all the storytelling—the tremor in the grip, the hesitation in a touch, the way his fingers close around nothing—transforms what could've been a gimmick into genuine syntax for grief and vulnerability.
Reviews
Both a rigorous formal exercise and a deeply emotional film that made me cry the first time I saw it.
Withholding everything but the protagonist's hands and the objects he uses, Cutaway turns a rigorous formal device into one of the most emotionally affecting shorts you can see.
Festivals
- 67th Locarno International Film Festival, Switzerland 2014
- Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival, France 2015
- TIFF Canada's Top Ten, Toronto 2015
- Museum of the Moving Image: First Look, New York 2015
- Dokufest International Documentary and Short Film Festival, Kosovo 2014
- International Film Festival Message to Man, Russia 2014
- Encounters Short Film and Animation Festival, United Kingdom 2014
- Oldenburg Film festival, Germany 2014
- Hamptons International Film Festival, New York 2014
- Chicago International Film Festival, Illinois 2014
- Starz Denver Film Festival, Colorado 2014
- St. Louis International Film Festival, Missouri 2014
- Atlantic Film Festival, Nova Scotia 2014
- Vancouver International Film Festival, British Columbia 2014
- Calgary International Film Festival, Alberta 2014
- Festival du Nouveau Cinema, Quebec 2014
- "Ça s’ra pas long" at cinema Excentris, Quebec 2014
- International Film Festival Bratislava, Slovakia 2014
- Rio de Janeiro International Film Festival, Brazil 2014
- Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, Estonia 2014
- Żubroffka Short Film Festival, Poland 2014
- Aguilar de Campoo International Short Film Festival, Spain 2014