Rob Munday
Sexuality is a common topic in cinema. Here on Short of the Week, our Sexuality channel remains one of our most-visited pages on the site and although we’ve seen a diverse range of perspectives exploring these themes, what happens to your desires as you age remains an angle rarely pursued. Recently, the Emma Thompson feature Good Luck to You, Leo Grande shone a light on these storytelling shortcomings, but as is often the case it was short film – with work like Lucy Bridger’s Returning and Zhannat Alshanova’s Paolo Makes a Wish – that lead the way. Another title to add to this small, but ever-expanding list is Or Sinai’s Anna, a 24-minute short that follows a mother and her desire for physical contact.
Named after its lead character, Anna introduces us to its protagonist through a brief shot of her asleep next to her son. Though it lasts less than 10-seconds, the significance of this shot, and the obvious bond between mother and son, will become much clearer throughout the rest of the film. With her son staying with his father for the weekend, we watch as Anna begs her boss for a double shift, before digging out a blue dress from its storage on top of the wardrobe and heading out into the sleepy town where she lives, in search of company. With this exposition concluded in about a fifth of the short’s total run-time, Anna’s reliance on her son for intimacy is clear and without him she’s left to look for it elsewhere and maybe consider her own needs.
Inspired by an immigrant Sinai met in Israel, the filmmaker was touched by her “humor and imagination” and felt inspired to use their meeting as fuel for her narrative. “We used to talk about the challenges of meeting men in Israel when you are a foreigner with no friends or family around”, the director explains, in conversation with Meghan Oretsky for the film’s online premiere on Vimeo. “Her experience started my imagination. I had an image of a lonely woman in a small deserted town, and I knew I wanted her to do whatever she could to fight her loneliness.”
Anna is driven by a stellar performance from Evgenia Dodina
Interested in reversing gender roles, Sinai puts her lead character on the search for sex, revealing (again in that interview with Vimeo) that she wanted to portray Anna as “the hunter”, while the male characters are her “victims”. Although Anna is very much focused on the female experience, it’s a film that should not only be commended for bringing this perspective to screen and challenging stereotypes in cinema, but should be praised for its accessibility and relatability. As a 40+yr-old man, I obviously wasn’t the intended audience for Anna (the filmmaker admits she originally thought that only women would relate to the film), but it resonated on a number of levels.
As we age and, in some cases, become parents, our own desires and needs can often be pushed to one side. Though a lot can change over these years, does our needs for intimacy every really fade? Or does it just get overshadowed in our list of priorities? For Anna, stripped from the bond she shares with her son for the weekend, we witness these cravings reappear and blossom and join her on her journey in search of a physical connection. Set on the hottest day of the summer, the temperatures rise throughout the film, as her desire threatens to boil over and engulf her. At the film’s climax, Anna finally gets what she wants and with it, it seems as if she’s found a new perspective – the little smile at the end, saying so much.
Winner of the Cinefondation Award at Cannes and the Best Short Feature Film Prize by the Israeli Film Academy, Sinai has more recently directed a new short Long Distance, the story of a woman losing her sight, who is forced to randomly ask strangers for help.