Wasp: The Searing Desperation of a Forsaken Young Mother

Through the years, Mother’s Day films have presented moms both good and bad, and Wasp features a most down-on-her-luck mother in contemporary Britain, an unfortunate mom who certainly isn’t going to be winning any Mother of the Year Awards. Wasp is an acclaimed short film directed by British filmmaker Andrea Arnold, which won the 2005 Academy Award for Live Action Short Film and the Jury Prize for International Short Filmmaking at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival. Wasp has been credited as having revived the genre of social realism in British cinema, and this short film has gained the status of a modern classic through Arnold’s sensitive humanistic approach, combined with modern filmmaking techniques.

The film is a searing and intimate portrait of Zoë, a forsaken young woman in contemporary England, who is mired in poverty, but who desperately wants something for herself aside from the oppressive limitations of being a single-mother of four. Despite the responsibility she bears, when a former crush unexpectedly reappears showing his first bit of romantic interest in her, Zoë jumps at the opportunity to go out on a date with him, behaving in painfully irresponsible ways.

On another level, Wasp is a stinging critique of the agonizing worship of the faux-celebrity lives manufactured by today’s pop-media, public relations machines. For Zoë, the Beckhams are the ideal family, the epitome of the fashionably idolized, providing an illusory escape from the harsh realities of her own life. They’re the idealized depiction of a family with three terribly good-looking young sons, a family whose real existence never steps in the way of their living the glamorous life. For Zoë, the Beckhams represent the false pinnacle of desire: never-ending luxury, fashionable motherhood and physical perfection in marriage. But there’s a gut-wrenching sadness to Zoë’s idealized obsession, for she can barely even feed her own children.

It is just phenomenal how much this film gets right; the level of deftness in the writing and presentation is stellar. Having already noted that Wasp has achieved the status of a modern classic, it would be very worthwhile for you to watch this engrossing film. Wasp is a perfect reintroduction to dramatic live-action short films: it is almost mandatory viewing for short film fans. Enjoy.

Wasp: The Searing Desperation of a Forsaken Young Mother

Read more about this film at Short of the Week here.

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The Eagleman Stag: 2013 SOTW Best Short Animation Award

“The larger our past gets, the smaller our present feels.”

The Eagleman Stag is an award-winning, stunning monochrome stop-motion animated short film by Michael Please, which was awarded Best Short Animation at the 2011 British Academy Film Awards (BAFTA). The film has received universal acclaim playing at high-profile film festivals including Sundance and SXSW, winning awards at Annecy and Clermont-Ferrand, in addition to BAFTA. The film was named one of 10 finalists competing for the 2013 Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. The Eagleman Stag has just been honored as winner of the 2013 SOTW Best Short Animation Award.

Told in a distinctive, contemporary film-noir style, The Eagleman Stag is a story of life and fear, a darkly comic take on one man’s obsession with the quickening perception of time that faces all of us as we age, and his attempts to counter this effect. As Peter Eagleman nears the end of his days, his obsessive attempts to define the world, and his haunting perception of time within it, leads to progressively extreme measures to control and counter time’s increasing pace.

The Eagleman Stag: 2013 SOTW Best Short Animation Award

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