A film about disappointment and pink hair.
Selected for Short of the Week! Click on the link to see the whole film.
Festival selections
Go Short! International Short Film Festival Nijmegen
Press
Serafima Serafimova on Short of the Week:
“Love is like shit. It just happens. The two often come as a package deal too, a package filled to the rim with blissful happiness and gut wrenching suffering. For teenager Liv, who’s experiencing her first love at the same time as her biggest heartbreak, these conflicting emotions are multiplied tenfold and Zara Dwinger does a brilliant job of showing us just how shit it feels. Cue tantrums, pink hair and a whole load of misplaced anger – this is teen dramedy, in all its angsty glory!
Liv is a teenager who is experiencing some pretty major firsts – first boyfriend, first kiss, first love… Unfortunately they all come at the same time as her parents’ announcement that they are separating. Desperate, she tries to save their marriage and deal with her own relationship at the same time. Liv is a bittersweet comedy about love, life, and growing up when you’re perhaps not quite ready for it. It’s dramatic, hilarious and one of the most painfully authentic portrayals of teenage life I have seen in a while.
I have been lucky enough not to know what it feels like to have your parents split up, but when it comes to heartbreaks, I could probably write a help guidebook on the subject. It would of course include spending hours alone in your room, listening to the most depressing/angry songs in your CD collection (Portishead were always my go-to band), as you construct various scenarios in your head, where the wretched boy realises how big of a dick he had been and comes begging for you to take him back.
Dwinger also took inspiration from her own experiences – “the film is inspired by the disappointment and confusion I encountered as an adolescent. The pink cloud of youth disappeared quite suddenly, and I began to see everything for what it was. Love, for example, turned out to be a bit more complex than I thought it was. I wanted to capture the feeling of this whirlwind of a period in a lighthearted way”, she explains. And she has certainly done that well.
I felt all the agonies of adolescence, seen through Liv’s eyes, with their overbearing weight and catastrophic consequences. From testing the boundaries of her own lustful desires, to facing her parents’ crumbling marriage. The anger, the denial, the rebellion, they all seem so achingly familiar, even more so because they are served with a good helping of humour on the side. Dwinger has accurately recreated the introspective holes and obsessions of adolescence whilst gently poking fun at it all. Watching Liv’s overly dramatic tantrums, you can’t help but feel a fond embarrassment and deep empathy for her, and therein lies the film’s undeniable emotional pull.”
On Go Short:
“10 years, 4 weeks! 4 weeks left to our festival and we will celebrate our 10 year jubilee with special blog posts in the next weeks. In this week we will shine a light at one of our standouts of last year, Zara Dwinger. Her short film LIV is the focus of the blogpost this week.
As an international filmfestival we like to recognize talented filmmakers. These standouts, as we call them, are Dutch filmmakers that have one of their films at Go Short in either one of our competition programs or in one of our out-of competition programs. Last year we posted several short videos about our so -called standouts on our facebook page. In one minute videos each of these standouts talk about their working process. Do these filmmakers have certain habits that enable them to advance their creativity? And how do they come up with the ideas for their short films? Zara Dwinger, for example, tells us that her favorite place to work is in bed. Watching films, reading books, visiting museums, even just looking around on the internet can spark ideas for this young female director. In the case of LIV her search through the internet led her to the discovery of a place called Disappointment Island. She was really surprised about the existence of an island called Disappointment Island and her short film LIV was a result of this excitement.
In LIV our main protagonist is on a little Disappointment Island herself. The first disappointment arises in the beginning of the film when she is in an intimate moment with a boy she has a crush on. In the middle of this intimate kiss, her mother calls her to ask her to come home. At home with her parents, another disappointment awaits for her….
LIV was part of the Go Ahead program line at the Go Short Film Festival last year. Go Ahead is the student program line for filmmakers who are still in film school, but are already showing they are talented filmmakers to be reckoned with.”
