Short of the Day
A coming-of-age tale.
At one point in the late 1990s when the internet was starting to become a part of our daily lives, 20% of all traffic online was geared towards pornography. How’s that for an opening sentence? It’s true, though. As a guy who started college in 1995, every time I went into a computer lab (remember those?) I’d be met by surprised and nervous eyes looking over their monitors. It was something everyone was doing and something everyone was lying about not doing. As such, the early days of internet usage were kind of like the spy game: full of secrecy, covert encounters, and covering one’s tracks for fear of being caught and outed.
This is the temporal and thematic background director Truls Krane Meby took as inspiration for his short film World Wide Woven Bodies, which premiered on NoBudge.com a few weeks back. It tells the story of Mads, a 12 year-old Norwegian boy on the cusp of his sexual awakening who is pushed over the edge once the internet – and the pornography it brings – come to his small, snowy, innocent town. Thus begins a cat-and-mouse game between Mads and his parents, the young boy trying to navigate this strange new world and the strange new feelings it elicits, and his parents, who can perceive but can’t understand the change in their son.
Though it’s technologically-based, Meby is a very naturalistic filmmaker and balances his topic with beautiful landscape shots and intimate details of domestic life. If you like this – and I’m pretty sure you will, that’s why it’s here – check out Meby’s previous effort Good Machine Gun Sound. He’s definitely a filmmaker to watch.
Related Topics: Short Films
