Featured Short: Ross Hogg & Duncan Cowles' ISABELLA
Haunting, with a unique touch of beauty and fragility, filmmakers Ross Hogg and Duncan Cowles’ “Isabella” is a short hybrid creation that employs elements of documentary, animation and narrative film, jumbling them together in order to produce an exploration of memory and time that will likely stick with you long after viewing (the irony)! The concept of memory can be quite abstract and absurd. As we age, all of our thoughts, words, and past situations become elusive to our process of both digesting information and recalling it. “Isabella” studies those inevitable consequences of aging through the introduction of, well...Isabella, filmmaker Ross Hogg’s own 92-yr old grandmother. The outcome of watching and listening to her try to recall and recite once vibrant memories is surreal, heartbreaking and yet profoundly human. The message plugged into “Isabella”, with its complementing animation style and camera work (a flawless collaboration between the filmmakers' two talents), is strong. It comes together in a way you wouldn’t expect and yet can’t look away from. I, for one, can sadly relate. Personally having had a blind grandmother battling alzheimer's disease towards the end of her life, I was taught a lot about the human condition after watching it slowly and desperately wither away. A word of advice: cherish your own thoughts and talk with your loved ones before everything gets lost in time. And then watch this ironically memorable official 2016 Indie Street Film Fesival selection below!