Shining Ashes
2018 · 13m
Directed by Nicole Campbell
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tense
Set in the 90s, a father's journey along the lines of his personal conviction exacts its price, in a hard-hitting take on how weapons bring repercussions home.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Expected a war drama, got... a war drama—competent, even moving, but it's treading the same moral reckoning ground everyone else walked in 2018, and I'm not sure Campbell finds anything new in the rubble.
Campbell's restraint is the entire film: she lets 90s period detail and intimate family geography do the ideological work, and the result sits naturally in a lineage of post-war intimacy pieces that understand how conviction calcifies into tragedy.
There's a single moment—a father's hands during a kitchen conversation—where Campbell holds just long enough that you realize the whole film's emotional weight lives in his inability to look his family in the eye, and that's the entire architecture.
Reviews
How an action, a deed can come back manifold within a day, remains the essence of the story. But, beyond that, the film is a mirror to today's society, touching upon grave matters.