From Omeleto.
Two friends hang out before moving.
TACENDA is used with permission from Luke and Rita Konopasky. Learn more at https://sdgpictures.com.
Noah and Dillion are best friends, but Dillion is headed across the country to move to New York. Before leaving, the pair spend one last day and evening together, visiting their favorite spots in Los Angeles before they end up at a party.
The pair share memories, jokes and music, happily spending quiet moments as well as laughter. But underneath it all lies an inevitable parting, as well as unspoken feelings and sentiments.
Directed and written by Luke and Rita Konopasky, this tender, restrained short romantic drama ambles along as two best friends hang out before parting. They soak in their favorite haunts, share inside jokes, and luxuriate over memories. But underneath the warm, relaxed tenor of their Los Angeles sojourn belies a growing sadness over the transition, as Noah struggles to decide whether or not to confess his feelings for Dillion before she leaves.
The film opens with Noah and Dillion revisiting favorite city haunts — local cafes, bookstores — each location steeped in memory and intimacy. Captured in warm, intimate cinematography and hazy light that evokes the halcyon nostalgia of youth and summer, Noah and Dillion don’t say much, but the spare dialogue makes their connection clear, rooted in shared history and small gestures. They share music, laughter and quiet moments, deeply comfortable with one another.
But with each stop of their hangout, Noah’s longing becomes more palpable — his eyes linger, his voice softens, but he never speaks the words. As Noah, actor Matt Davies-Morris’s sensitive, subtle performance carries much of the dramatic tension as he wrestles with his feelings: will he say something? But Dillion — played by actor Grace Johnson with a sturdy charm — seems to sense Noah’s unexpressed sentiments. And while there’s something on her end, perhaps, she’s also headed to a new city to pursue her dreams and goals. And so feelings remain unspoken, gently wafting the narrative to its elegiac, bittersweet ending.
TACENDA is Latin for "things better left unsaid," a fitting title for a narrative exploring a friend’s unspoken feelings in the face of an inevitable transition. Minimal and yet brimming with feeling, the film doesn’t rely on dramatic reveals, thriving in the spaces between words, lingering glances and half‑spoken goodbyes. It generates a palpable atmosphere, a private world between two people that cocoons them in the hopes and possibilities of youth and the future: a threshold between youth and adulthood, where dreams become concrete. The here and now, full and rich as it is with friendship, emotion and sensation, must soon become the past to move toward these shimmering futures. And yet it leaves behind a palimpsest of longing and melancholy, a ghost of "what may have been." TACENDA’s gift is how it captures the lingering beauty of these romantic ghosts, even as time inexorably carries us along its currents.
