SNARE
2019 · 14m · Australia
Directed by Madeleine Gottlieb
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, family
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
It's 1997 and distorted guitars rule the world. In an ageing Chinese restaurant, a father and his punk-rock son struggle with their familial roles as each realizes they desperately need something from the other.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The '90s punk backdrop could've been a gimmick, but Gottlieb resists it—what emerges is a genuinely strange alchemy where distorted guitars become the only language a father and son can't quite speak to each other, which is the opposite of what you'd expect.
A formally restrained family drama that understands its debt to the school of intimate observation—the Chinese restaurant as liminal space, the period detail as emotional texture rather than nostalgia—executed with the kind of compositional patience that recalls Hou or early Kiarostami.
The sound design is the hinge: Gottlieb lets the guitars bleed through scenes of quiet conversation, never resolving whether the music is diegetic or emotional, and that single choice transforms a small-scale generational standoff into something that breathes.
Reviews
Väter sind im Idealfall irgendwie langweilig. Weil wir uns auf sie verlassen können.