“Papa’s Corner,” directed by A.J. Lising

San Diego Short Film Festival

Drama

TRT 15:46

 

Spoiler Alert. You may wish to see the film before continuing. Well, you have been warned. Jay (Erik Luminarias) is participating in a spelling bee when he is confronted by a strange word: “smaragdine.” This presents a challenge – presumably not because he doesn’t know the word or how to spell it, but as we find, because the word has a strong emotional tie for Jay to his beloved and deceased grandfather, Papa (Val Victa). What follows are a pair of flashbacks, first to a memorable day with Papa and then to the reason why the word ties Jay and Papa together.

All words trigger memories. “Apple” creates an image in your head of a previously experienced apple or facsimile of an apple. In the case of “smaragdine,” Lising moves beyond purely lexical semantics (“smaragdine” means “of or relating to emeralds, or emerald-green in color”) to explore Jay’s cognitive linguistic response to the word (it’s the color Papa used to paint an emerald necklace in a portrait of his wife). The evocation hits Jay profoundly enough that he nearly fails to spell the word in the bee.

Lising makes a lot of interesting and complex choices here. The flashbacks are technically out of temporal order, meaning Jay feels the loss of his grandfather before remembering why he was thinking of his grandfather in the first place. Blocking is done with clear vision and purpose --when the camera moves, it’s because Lising knows where he wants your attention; when it’s stationary, he knows you can focus on the detail of your choosing without missing any beats.

The acting is uniformly very good, with Luminarias and Victa conveying the heavy emotional work quite well through dialog and body language. But even the child actors in the first flashback are good, which isn’t always a given in short films.

The second flashback feels like it could be a little tighter, especially compared to the rest of the movie’s more economical sensibilities. But that’s no reason to overlook this heartfelt look at the power that words have to elicit complex feelings.