End Zoom
2021 · 10m · USA
Directed by Pepi Ginsberg
Tones: darkly comic, humorous, tense
Another grim grid-of-faces writing workshop on Zoom, until a frustrated student gets workshopped within an inch of his life and decides to return the favor. The pandemic-era classroom as cage match.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Most Zoom shorts aged like an unopened La Croix; this one still has fizz because Ginsberg uses the format as a guillotine. The MFA workshop as the cruelest reality TV ever invented.
Workshop satire trapped in the Brady-Bunch grid that scarred us all — Pepi Ginsberg uses gallery view as proscenium and the cruelty intensifies. The Host comparison is real but the closer relative is Mamet's House of Games rerouted through Cloudflare.
Pandemic-era Zoom-gallery staging is a tough format to make sing, but using the workshop as cage match — and weaponizing the very thing that broke us all — is exactly the kind of self-aware comic premise that lives or dies on cutting between tiles.