Nordo
2022 · 11m · USA
Directed by Kyle Taubken
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tense
A woman faces mounting anxiety and fear when her pilot husband unexpectedly volunteers to fly troops and refugees out of Afghanistan in August 2021. Inspired by real events.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone wants to make the Big Statement about Afghanistan—Nordo refuses, and that restraint is almost perverse: a geopolitical eruption compressed into one woman's kitchen, which should feel small but somehow doesn't.
Taubken demonstrates formal discipline by inverting the evacuation narrative entirely—the frame stays domestic, the sound design carries the chaos we never see—positioning this squarely in a lineage of home-front modernism that demands active, attentive viewing.
The decision to let the husband remain almost entirely off-screen, present only through phone calls and the wife's reactions, transforms what could've been a conventional anxious-spouse story into something structurally ingenious on a tight budget.
Festivals
- Indie Memphis Film Festival 2022, Best Hometowner Narrative Short
- South Georgia Film Festival 2023, Best Narrative Short