Gold and Mud
2023 · 10m · USA
Directed by Conor Dooley
Tones: absurdist, humorous, melancholic
Dr. Ana Fabrega rockets through an entire human life — career, marriage, mortality — in a fast-paced sentimental comedy that swings wildly between huge emotion and pure banality.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
An entire life crammed into a short with the alt-comedy bench of the decade — Fabrega, Firestone, Burgess, Schiller. The audacity of using all that firepower for something this weird is exactly my brand.
Cradle-to-grave compression played in the deadpan-ensemble alt-comedy register — Dooley lets Ana Fabrega's face do operatic and banal in the same beat. Ambitious miniature.
Compressing a whole lifetime — career, marriage, death — into a single short and ricocheting between operatic and banal is a wild structural bet, and Ana Fabrega's face is the kind of instrument that can carry it. Either virtuosic or a montage.
Reviews
A sentimental film that tackles an entire life with huge swings of emotion and banality.