Waiting for Trains

I caught this film in 2003 at Nacogdoches Film Festival.

The film is very sparse on dialog and very heavy on imagery. Of all the short films shown at the NFF this one stuck with me. If you get a chance to watch it I highly recommend it.

IMDb now requires a minimum line count for comments so I'll talk briefly about the effectiveness of this film as a short. The details are kept to an absolute minimum, but are heavy in nature. The main character is sympathetic. The idea is simple, but has impact. Many short films have a tendency to be either a compressed feature or a trailer for a feature. This is a great example of a film that transcends.

The film, while commendable for its attention to tonality and photography, simply doesn't gel as a cohesive, meaningful narrative. Monteverde's direction is highly reliant on said wonderful photography, but his story simply makes no sense.

Ostensibly about a modern Civil War, there is absolutely no proof of this at all during the film, and the connections it attempts to make between the main characters' childhood and his current situation are tenuous at best. It's a broad attempt at nostalgia, but better choices could have been made, both in the past and present narratives.

But as I said, it's kinda pretty.