


In the past couple of years, cinematography changed very much, making directors play with techniques, blend them, transform a genre through another one, or just mix them until a new desirable product makes it out. This is why experimental shorts blew over the past years, and now we have the most abstract and distinctive ones. Sometimes they become easy to be understood, but most of the times, the viewer needs at least one dictionary of movie techniques, and two or three books of themes interpretation. Moshen Shwady’s ‘Soft Sun’ may be part of that last category, if the viewer is not one hundred percent focused on the theme and the construction of the characters.
We had our problems dealing with this short; first of all, it is so abstract, one can hardly fully understand where this is going, and most of all, where does it start from. In an idealistic way, the action seems to be written by a crew where each and every one of the writers came with a personal vision over the subject. There are so many questions in our head right now…for example – why did one of the characters started running wearing a blue T-shirt, and why in the next frame his T-shirt instantly becomes orange? How does he manage to climb that hill with such ease, whilst his friend struggled so much to do it? What was happening on top of that cliff? The plot overview is as abstract as the movie itself, and doubled our confusion towards this short.
The camera work was shaky, but in this situation it gave a really nice artistic effect to the whole thing. We experienced the true feeling the main character expressed by his theatrical role play, and this is something we really appreciated in 'Soft Sun' as it is quite rare to find in today’s short movies. All in all, we’ve seen ‘Soft Sun’ as being like an UFO – we don’t know where it came from, we clearly don’t know what it wants from us, but surely is something hidden inside it that is beyond our power of understanding.
Written by Vlad A. G