Cycles
2023 · 14m · USA
Directed by Pisie Hochheim, Tony Oswald
Genres: documentary
Tones: melancholic, tender
A single mother from rural Kentucky travels to San Diego to sell her eggs for the last time to support her two children, grappling with the physical and emotional toll of the process. The subject is co-director Tony Oswald's sister, whose personal relationship with the filmmakers yields a documentary of rare intimacy.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A real story about reproductive labor as economic last resort, made by someone close enough to be inside it — that intimacy is the thing that keeps it from being just another Short of the Week tearjerker. Skeptical of the SOTW packaging, but the subject calling her brother to film her is too good to dismiss.
The kinship between subject and filmmaker recalls Jonathan Caouette's Tarnation in its refusal of the documentarian's distance — a sister asks her brother to film what she cannot quite say aloud. Rare access of this kind tends to produce either evasion or something approaching truth, and the bodily stakes here suggest the latter.
The fact that the subject initiated this project herself — asking her brother to film her final donation cycle — is what gives the doc its access; you can't fake that proximity. Short of the Week's framing is solid but the page only hints at runtime (3:39 trailer length, not the 14-min film).
Reviews
A novel twist in the corpus of procreation stories — the personal relationship between subject and documentarians allows for a film of rare intimacy.
Festivals
- Seattle International Film Festival 2024
- New Orleans Film Festival
- New Hampshire Film Festival, Jury Award for Best Documentary Short
- Ouray International Film Festival, Best Editing
- Beloit International Film Festival 2024