From Omeleto.
A woman helps her mother.
GOLDEN HOUR is used with permission from Charlotte Woolfe. Learn more at https://charlottewoolfe.com.
Dolores and her mother Mizzi are in the kitchen together. Dolores is trying to help her mother find her keys, but her mother is having trouble tracing her steps. They are loving and affectionate, but there is also a simmering tension between them at times, as the mother feels her daughter is treating her like an idiot and the daughter is impatient.
The two continue to spend time in the kitchen together, reminiscing about their past. But the cozy kitchen reveals itself as something else entirely, and the pair must work out the mystery to find their way out.
Directed and written by Charlotte Woolfe, this intriguing and intimate short explores a mother-daughter bond at the precipice of a major transition. It begins in a golden haze, with an almost pastoral sense of coziness, thanks to the beautifully warm, hazy cinematography and the nostalgic charm of the old-fashioned kitchen. But as the relationship reveals more ambiguity and complexity, we see something more disquieting, stylized and surreal beneath the cozy surface.
The writing seems ordinary and intimate at first, as Dolores helps her mother to find her keys, digging around the kitchen’s drawers and cabinets. But the pair gets irritated and impatient with one another, especially as the task drags on. As Dolores and Mizzi, respectively, actors Charlotte Woolfe and Anka Liebe delicately convey both a deep love and an accumulated history of small resentments, irritations and judgments. These pop up and then are batted away, especially by Dolores, who seems determined to complete some task with her mother.
What slowly emerges is a need to leave the kitchen, which reveals itself to be more than what it is in a subtly eerie stylistic pivot. Dolores and Mizzi cannot yet leave this oddly timeless, untouched kitchen, at least not together. When Dolores is admonished by her mother to take a moment to enjoy a cup of hot chocolate together before they try again, Dolores finally realizes certain realities that her efforts can’t escape or evade and accepts her mother’s advice.
Softly understated in tone and directed with an eye for the emotional undercurrents of its characters, GOLDEN HOUR’s quiet and even languid tenor plays against the dramatic shift happening between the characters, handled with a graceful, restrained reveal. As the search reveals itself as ultimately futile, its themes come into poetic focus: the importance of being present in the moment instead of struggling towards an always out-of-reach future. In the end, it emerges as a meditation on acceptance, time and how love is most felt through shared moments, which become cherished memories we can revisit when the future arrives in all its anguish and sadness.
