From Omeleto.
A family business shuts down.
LAST DAYS OF THE LAB is used with permission from Maria Alvarez. Learn more at https://mvafilms.com.
Lucia and her teenage daughter Isabel are shutting down the family business, a photo lab once run by Lucia’s late husband Hugo. They sift through old photographs, tapes and home videos up to the final day of business.
As they go through the memorabilia, they uncover old memories and long-forgotten feelings; it also reveals a rift in how the mother and daughter process loss. When Isabel discovers old footage of her father, it brings up emotions she can’t deny anymore, as she tries to bridge the distance between a father who is no longer there and a mother who seems to have moved on already.
Directed by Maria Alvarez from a script co-written with Ethan Newmyer, this achingly tender, resonant short drama captures the transition, loss and reckoning of a mother and daughter as they grapple with the loss of the family business, a photo lab once run by Hugo, the father and husband of a loving, hard-working family. The mother and daughter lost Hugo a while ago; now they are losing the physical embodiment of their father and their collective memory. It’s yet another grief they must reckon with — not just the loss of the person, but the object of his hopes, dreams and passion while he was alive.
Visually, the film has a lived-in feel, shot in subdued, muted colors and lighting, though with a polish and subtle gleam that denotes the narrative’s present tense. The close-ups and detail shots of the lab and characters give us a sense of intimacy, embedding us in the tactile, physical world of this family’s history, filled with photographs, bills, notes and videotapes. The archival footage — grainy, handheld, and equally as intimate — is gritty and lived-in as well, and the contrast between the emotional intimacy of this footage with the distance of time and space is striking for both viewers and for Isabel, who is especially drawn to the videotapes.
Isabel and Lucia have lost the same person, but the pair seems distant from one another. As Lucia, actor Arianna Ortiz is practical and focused on closing the store, but Isabel would rather focus on retrieving any artifact of her father. This annoys Lucia, who seems eager to be done with it all, an attitude that sparks bewilderment from Isabel, played by actor Alex Felix with a somber understatement. As the pair spar with one another and then make their way through the store’s inventory, they each find their way to deal with their feelings — and then find their way back to each other through a shared love and grief that’s reconciled with the act of sifting through and soaking in memories.
That link — between love, grief and memory as the bridge between both — is part of the larger meaning of LAST DAYS OF THE LAB. Executive produced by Lena Waithe, this powerful yet restrained film ends with an image that itself feels like a memory, captured like a hazy snapshot taken at a distance, as if snapped in a moment of thought and wistfulness. That mixture of thoughtfulness and poignant emotion is suffused throughout the short, one that lingers like a haunting, aching memory as well, long after viewing.
