From Omeleto.
A teenager is shaken.
ABEL is used with permission from Dekel Berenson and Paul Wesley. Learn more at https://abelshortfilm.com.
Abel is a 17-year-old first-generation Mexican-American who resides on a farm nestled in the outskirts of the Sierra Nevada mountains. When he’s not caring for the animals on the farm, he escapes into the world of video games. But when he’s playing with his girlfriend online, she breaks up with him over chat without much explanation.
The breakup leaves him shaken, and he seeks refuge in the mountains to hunt. The nature offers him solitude but not solace, so he returns home, where he finds unexpected comfort in his aging father’s wisdom about loss and pain.
Directed by Dekel Berenson and Paul Wesley from a script written by Berenson, this sparse, graceful short drama explores loss, grief and vulnerability through the lens of a father-son pair, as the younger man experiences his first big heartbreak and the other must console him. Through a shared sense of loss, they find a way to connect, as pain, social change, and generational differences intertwine in a tale that explores how tenderness and love permeate even the most laconic and masculine of relationships.
The film’s stately, elegant storytelling is deceptively simple, initially striking for its stunning visuals of Abel’s milieu. The farm, the mountains and vistas in the distance, the wide-open horizons that are both majestic and isolating: the cinematography turns the farm setting into a character of its own, as the container where Abel and his father go about their daily lives. Even their home is framed in a way to emphasize the cloistered, lived-in home, with shadows and doorways carving out chambers of solitude for each family member. The visual spaces of the film feel allegorical, a metaphor for how these men exist side-by-side, yet remain disconnected.
The guiding ethos of the film is its emotional restraint, found not just in the quiet grandeur of its nature but also in its performances. As Abel, actor Joshua Rivera eschews melodrama, instead emphasizing how Abel retreats into himself. In his heartbreak, his decision to hunt feels almost meditative, as a way to process his heartbreak and loss. But it’s not quite enough to comfort him. Instead, that comes from an unexpected source: his own father.
Played by actor Daniel Edward Mora in a quiet but deeply affecting performance, Abel’s father has the same seemingly diffident manner as his son, but also the weight of unspoken pain and regret. He shares a profound personal story with Abel, which forms the heart and the turning point of the film; it resonates not just for Abel, but for the audience, who can trace the way that emotional expression and ideas of what it means to be a man are learned from one generation to another. But the writing is never dogmatic; instead, its specificity and honesty work in a quietly spellbinding way, offering grace and comfort that helps lift the weight off Abel.
Emotionally honest, moving and confident in its quiet minimalism, ABEL is an immensely graceful film, capturing one young man’s coming of age with maturity. It refuses easy emotionalism, instead choosing a thoughtful poeticism to capture an almost spiritual state of being: the mute incomprehension of heartbreak, the weight of grief and anger that has no outlet, the quiet relief of being understood and empathized with. It reminds us how sadness and love co-exist, how parental love embraces and carries us through hardship and how family stories — and the honesty and love with which they’re told — can help us grow.
