Rae
2017 · 11m · Canada
Directed by Devery Jacobs
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A depressed mother, based on the filmmaker's own grandmother, has forgotten her young daughter's birthday.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise reads like every indie therapy session about intergenerational trauma—depressed mom, forgotten birthday, the works—but Jacobs refuses to weaponize the grandmother's pain for catharsis, which is genuinely perverse in the best way.
A formally restrained portrait that understands the weight of absence; the film's economy of gesture situates itself in a lineage of intimate family cinema that privileges what remains unsaid, recalling the measured restraint of Agnes Varda's late work.
The precision is in what Jacobs doesn't show—a single held shot of the daughter's face, or the way a room empties of sound, transforms the forgetting from melodrama into something tactile and specific, the kind of formal choice that makes a slim 11 minutes feel necessary.
Festivals
- imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival 2017, Ellen Monague Award for Best Youth Work