Tapes
2020 · 10m · USA
Directed by Dara Katz, Betsy Kenney
Tones: darkly comic, tender
A young woman uncovers a 30-year-old cassette recording of her parents' clinical-trial session and hears her mother — pregnant with her at the time — call the baby a parasite. She confronts her family at Sunday dinner, sparking an awkward reckoning that unexpectedly draws them closer.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects the cathartic family-dinner blowup, but Katz and Kenney slip in through the side door—burying the bomb in a clinical research file and letting the archive itself become the confession, which is genuinely weird and kind of brilliant.
The film's formal restraint—using institutional documentation as emotional infrastructure rather than sentiment—places it in conversation with essayistic cinema and the long tradition of family reckoning narratives, executed with admirable precision in nine minutes.
The decision to withhold the cassette's voice until the dinner table, letting the clinical context frame the revelation before the human voice breaks through, is the fulcrum that transforms a familiar premise into something that genuinely lands.
Reviews
The family dynamics that are juggled from start to finish will be one of the most real and relatable experiences of the shorts this year.
A hilarious slice of how dysfunctional functional families operate.
Festivals
- Tribeca Film Festival 2020