DRIFT AWAY (2010)

rift Away is a beautiful, but sadly melancholy 4-minute short film. During its course, a gracious and ethereal young woman slowly glides silently and all alone through the busily teeming streets of Hong Kong. During the earliest part of the film, it’s somewhat difficult to discern exactly what’s going on in this little film, or even what the movie’s theme might be, except possibly a visual rendering of the emotional deadness of anomie and anhedonia in contemporary urban life. The attractive young woman’s eyes acutely capture everything around her, but only the movie’s camera can catch her own eyes. Sadly, it’s probably true that only when you’re really able to lose yourself in something or someone else, only then will you finally become capable of an emotional investment in yourself, another person and/or the world around you. Lacking that, the despairing message for people left with a desolately barren life in the midst of the intensely seething modern world is something like: “Pour your misery down, pour your misery down on me.”