Margie Soudek's Salt and Pepper Shakers
2023 · 12m · USA
Directed by Meredith Moore
Genres: documentary
A documentary portrait of 94-year-old Margie Soudek and her massive collection of salt and pepper shakers, brought to life through inventive visual effects created by her granddaughter, VFX instructor Meredith Moore. Part love letter, part experiment, the film merges the real and the fantastical to explore collecting, obsession, and the legacies we leave behind.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
VFX-instructor granddaughter blasts her 94-year-old grandmother with rainbows and explosions while she shows off her shaker collection. The genre-bending isn't doing what they think it's doing, but the underlying portrait sounds genuinely affectionate.
Moore and her VFX students surrounding a 94-year-old grandmother with explosions and rainbows — this sits in the Kirsten Lepore/Dick Johnson Is Dead tradition where collaboration with the subject becomes the love letter. The New Yorker's imprimatur is well-placed.
A VFX instructor enlisting her students to surround her 94-year-old grandmother with explosions and rainbows is the kind of formal-meets-personal collaboration that earns the New Yorker placement. The desktop-doc-meets-fantasy register is the right tonal vehicle for affection.
Reviews
Meredith Moore's 'Margie Soudek's Salt and Pepper Shakers' is the kind of Mother's Day offering that goes down easy: full of charm, warmth and surprises, especially with all those big explosions.
Funny, touching and inventive, there are so many layers to Moore's short that after watching it, it's hard not to reflect on both the obsessive nature of humanity and the legacies we leave behind when we die.
Festivals
- Sundance Film Festival 2023
- SXSW 2023
- Big Sky Documentary Film Festival 2023