Shooting Star
2019 · 8m
Directed by Keaton Wooden, Dani Shay
Genres: drama, experimental, romance
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A modern digital love story told vertically for the smartphone screen, following two people whose connection plays out through the language of the devices in their hands.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Vertical phone romance sounds like a TikTok greeting card, but Wooden and Shay actually weaponize the format—the constraint becomes the whole point, and that's genuinely weird in a way that matters.
The vertical frame echoes the cinema of constraint that reaches back through experimental video art, though the film's sentimentality occasionally overwhelms the formal rigor it's clearly reaching for.
The decision to let the smartphone UI *become* the grammar of intimacy—notifications, typing indicators, the pause before a message—transforms a formal limitation into the film's nervous system, and that single choice makes the whole thing breathe.
Reviews
The directors ensure that you soak yourself in the millennials' world of FaceTime, Texts and WhatsApp... instead of making them seem like a barrier, the directors transform the digital screen into the fourth wall.