This short is part of the New Zealand documentary shorts series called Loading Docs and in some small ways is similar to another film in the series, called Homing. I liked Homing as a sort of visual poem, moving around an empty home and playing the sounds of the family and lives we could not see. Today is a much more interesting film but it essentially does the same thing in that the camera moves around a care home, setting up static shots in rooms and corridors and capturing the sound of the home. It isn't about talking heads or opinions, it is about the sense of the place.
In this regard it is really interesting and its scope fits the 3 minute run time really well (not the case with all the Loading Docs shorts). The choice of shots is really good; there are frames which look really good and are very well captured but nothing that is so impressive that it feels like the point was to get a great shot at the expense of content or substance. The static shots hold for a good choice of time; in some cases we see things very clearly, in others we are just hearing the noises of the home – both are equally interesting and I was really surprised by how engaged I was in the film as a whole since it basically has no dialogue to speak and is just about putting the viewer in this place for 3 minutes.
With some of the other short films in Loading Docs I have thought that maybe there was a longer, better film to be found with more time and less editing, however in the case of Bouchet and Mayow's film, I think it is spot on right in terms of what it does and how it does it. It is limited in scope but by being so it is a much more effective film.
