Night Ride
2021 · 10m · New Zealand
Directed by Todd Karehana
Genres: documentary, drama, family
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Todd Karehana joins his 66-year-old mother on her nightly ritual of feeding stray cats near their old family home, probing its connection to his brother's death.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects this to be a grief meditation, and Karehana almost lets you believe it—until you realize the cats are doing the actual emotional work, and the brother's death is almost incidental to what's really being grieved here. It's perverse in the best way.
A formally precise essay film that inherits from the tradition of intimate documentary portraiture; Karehana's decision to frame the nightly ritual as ceremony rather than habit gives the piece its necessary weight and restraint.
The entire film hinges on a single sound choice—the overlap of his mother's quiet humming with the ambient night—that transforms what could've been sentimental into something genuinely unsettling; a 10-minute film that understands how much one layer of audio can carry.