Venice
2015 · 4m · Australia
Directed by Venetia Taylor
Genres: comedy, coming-of-age
Josh is backpacking in Venice and calls his mum in Sydney for more money — but he doesn't understand backpacking, and she doesn't understand Skype.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a perfectly fine fish-out-of-water gag, but 'tourist calls mom for cash' is exactly the kind of premise that gets a knowing nod at every film school in the world—nothing here makes me say wait, WHAT, just wait, yeah, I've seen that.
The cross-continental Skype setup echoes a lineage of displacement comedy, though the execution trades formal control for broad generational humor; it's spirited but lacks the editing precision that would elevate it to something we'd still be discussing.
The genius lives in the sound design—that specific moment when the Skype lag becomes a character itself, creating comedy from *absence* rather than action, which turns a two-location constraint into the film's entire engine.