Adam Banks

Traveling to a faraway place with no real itinerary and zero responsibilities is one of the most tried-and-true ways of ignoring whatever ails you. When you’re somewhere that bears no resemblance to home, time seems to stretch out and slow down, every stranger you meet feels like a possible answer to all your problems, and if they aren’t, they can at least serve as a trusty companion for a few days before you part ways forever. Everyone has a different reason for traveling, but there’s always a healthy pocket of people who fly across the globe to distract from whatever haunts them back home, and Lia and Ralph are two lost souls seeking exactly this—who just happen to discover each other instead.

You’d think this was the start of a love story. Co-director Spencer Thielman cites his own parents’ example, who met on a plane in the 80s, as an inspiration, so perhaps romance would be the easiest way to frame this film. But Thielman and co-director Emily Berge choose a different path for Lia and Ralph. Both are in a state of vulnerability—Lia has just left her prestigious grad program after being put on probation due to concerns around burnout and self-harm, while Ralph is enjoying his honeymoon—only he’s by himself.

The relationship between these two travelers lies somewhere between friendship and romance; they share the same aisle on an airplane, then a cab on the way into town, and then they do whatever the other one suggests next. Lia and Ralph share an innocent few days, and it’s more interesting that way—it’s not the kind of film that needs a detailed, puzzle-like plot. Rather, it pulls its strength from a script filled with naturalistic dialogue and a pair of deeply real performances from actors Tal Chatterjee and W. Ian Ross. Though not quite a romance, there’s a sense that the future might bring them together again, and one wonders if a feature-length version of this film might lead these two characters in that direction.

While getting audiences to invest emotionally in Lia and Ralph’s travails is the most fundamental component to the success of the short and a tribute to its actors and writing, the production is notable. Thielman and Berge shot the film primarily on location in Northern Thailand with a small cast and crew, and they took advantage of small, unobtrusive cameras to capture footage in places you’re normally not allowed to shoot in without a permit. Though the filmmakers scouted a number of locations on an earlier trip to Thailand, one would imagine that a lot of locations were found along the way, which feels appropriate for a film that celebrates the freedom of open-ended travel and the way so many people throw their plans out the window in order to go with the flow. It feels like a film that might have had a much larger budget if it had adhered to a more rigid plot, and I mean this as a compliment.

Perhaps the biggest score for the short film budget was an airplane set that the filmmakers stumbled upon by accident. While stopping for lunch on a location scout, the directors saw an Airbus-turned-coffee shop on the side of the road in the middle of a parking lot, and after negotiating with the owners, they were able to shoot the plane interiors there instead of scheduling it separately on a high-dollar airplane set in North America. This is the kind of beautifully serendipitous thing that happens when you wander long enough in another part of the world.

All in all, Lia Has to Go Home is a touching film that will resonate with anyone who’s ever wandered the earth in search of something unfamiliar. Despite the vast numbers of twenty and thirty-somethings that travel to Southeast Asia each year in search of some deeper meaning, you don’t see a ton of short films that depict this particular experience. The obvious answer for why there aren’t many films like this is that it’s expensive to fly a film crew around the world to make a short film. That being said, I’m glad this crew found themselves in Thailand and came back with this film, about this particular slice of the world. It perfectly captures a specific flavor of youthful melancholy paired with possibility, and reminds me of my own time there—the days I spent motorbiking through the hills of Northern Thailand with a person I’d met the day before, and the nights spent wandering around Chiang Mai, eating Khao Soi soup and wondering where I’d head next.

Previously featured on Short of the Week for their similarly wistful work, Cosmic Bowling, we are honored to welcome Thielman and Berge back to the site for the film’s online premiere. Future film plans are uncertain at the moment, but the duo recently sold a middle-grade novel to Simon & Schuster, and Emily is finishing her master’s degree in fiction at the Bennington Writers Seminar.