Safe Among Stars
2019 · 9m · Canada
Directed by Jess X. Snow
Genres: drama, fantasy, LGBTQ+
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
A queer Chinese-American woman cannot find words for her immigrant mother about leaving school. As dissociation intensifies, she begins teleporting involuntarily and must learn to control the sudden power.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The teleportation gimmick could've been a trap—magical realism for its own sake—but Snow uses it as a *refusal*, a body saying no before the mouth can manage words; it's a premise that actually earns its weirdness by making the fantastical do the emotional labor.
Snow positions dissociation and diaspora within a lineage of formalist cinema concerned with untranslatable experience; the teleportation operates as both metaphor and formal constraint, a structure that recalls everything from Chungking Express to Wavelength without borrowing their gestures.
The genius move is that every involuntary teleport is a hard cut—the edit itself becomes the symptom, fracturing the spatial logic of the scene in real time, so the editing rhythm *is* the dissociation, which is a choice that costs nothing but changes everything about how you feel the mother's distance.