Saturday.2019
Short Film
Saturday follows a family of five as they spend a day at the beach from the perspective of their young daughter. The film attends to the minute, fragmentary details as an unexpected crisis unfolds to produce a poetic ambiguity.
Saturday, a part of constellations of works each titled after a day of the week, is an evocation of the irregular, illogical and nonlinear process of grief at the loss of a child, and of the gap in time between the moment a traumatic event occurs and when it is perceived. As the viewer follows a joyful trip to the beach by a family with three young children, innocence and happiness give way to the unthinkable. While the day unfolds on-screen, the audience comes to realize, through subtle audiovisual cues, that a tragedy has occurred: one of the three children has drowned. Decisions are made in a state of shock, and the blurred lines between the rational and irrational interrupt and fragment the journey back home. The parents opt to bring their dead son back in the same car with the two other children pretending as if he is sleeping.