LUNGS
2023 · 11m · USA
Directed by Kieran Moreira
Genres: drama, sci-fi, thriller
Tones: contemplative, dark, tense
In a near-future where environmental collapse has made breathable air scarce, Satchel, a former baseball pitcher, flees a band of violent scavengers after refusing to take part in their cruelty, and finds an uneasy alliance with a stranger who may be her only chance at survival.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a competent dystopia-as-moral-test, which is exactly the kind of middlebrow sci-fi premise that makes most festivals nod approvingly—and that's precisely why it doesn't crack anything open. The baseball pitcher detail feels like a flourish bolted onto a familiar survival parable, not a genuine constraint that rewires the story's DNA.
Moreira assembles the machinery of intimate sci-fi with clear-eyed control: the oxygen scarcity is a formal device, not spectacle, which aligns the film squarely in the lineage of chamber dystopias from Enemies, a Love Story to Never Let Me Go. The editing discipline—what it withholds—suggests a filmmaker thinking in paragraphs, not scenes.
What makes this work is the decision to make the pitcher's throwing arm the actual crux of survival—not metaphorical redemption, but a specific physical capability that matters in this world—and Moreira commits to that choice so cleanly that an 11-minute film with no money suddenly feels inevitable rather than constrained.
Reviews
Director Moreira does a marvelous job of creating a bleak and dystopian world... the filmmakers tackle profound moral questions within the sci-fi framework.
Festivals
- Charlotte Film Festival 2023
- Cucalorus Film Festival 2023