Paper Geese
2021 · 14m · United States
Directed by Elizabeth Chatelain
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, family
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
After an unsuccessful goose hunt in rural North Dakota, a young girl begins to see her father in a new and unsettling light, quietly reckoning with the gap between his expectations and her own conscience.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects the hunting trip to be the climax, the moral showdown—but Chatelain refuses that contract entirely, which should feel like a cop-out and somehow doesn't. The real subversion is that quiet refusal itself, the way a child's conscience doesn't need to explode to matter.
There's a deliberate formal restraint here that sits in the lineage of slow cinema and Midwestern minimalism, where rupture happens in the spaces between glances rather than dialogue—precise editing that trusts the viewer's literacy with silence.
The film lives or dies on the daughter's face in the truck after the hunt fails, and Chatelain holds it long enough that we watch the moment her father becomes a stranger to her; that single choice of duration over dialogue is what makes the whole moral architecture land.
Reviews
The story was very common and relatable that fathers may not understand what kind of impact they have on their children.
A young girl grapples with seeing her father in a new light after an unsuccessful goose hunt — a tender exploration of the tension between seeking parental approval and maintaining personal values.
Festivals
- Hamptons International Film Festival 2021
- Twin Cities Film Fest 2021
- Tacoma Film Festival 2021
- Uppsala International Short Film Festival 2021
- DC Shorts Film Festival 2021