A war never ends; the armistice is just an illusion. The real war doesn’t necessarily happen on the battlefield, but within each participant. Not coincidentally, as Tyler Mendelson points out in his short film, ‘In Between the White Space‘, the number of suicides among soldiers after leaving the battlefield sometimes exceeds the number of victims killed in the conflagration. The difficulty of talking about such a topic, when it comes to cinematography, involves two aspects: on the one hand, the delicacy of the theme itself, and, on the other hand, the multitude of films focused on this subject that seem to have already exhausted the most painful scenarios of physical and mental torture associated with such events. However, a pain is never a cliché, as everyone suffers in their own way. Therefore, the two characters in the short film signed by Tyler Mendelson, come before us with some emotional wounds that, even though they may no longer impress an already desensitized audience due to their permanent contact with the violence of today’s media, expose an authentic story, while illustrating the disastrous course of losing self-confidence and contact with the present. Based on the experience of two soldiers confronted with the context of the war in Afghanistan, the director orchestrates an intense dialogue between two individuals, between two forms of solitude trying to fight PTSD, through an interesting cinematic convention that highlights the terrible deafness of the world and the suffering of others.
Mike and Cody are two veterans trying to overcome, each in his own way, the traumatic memory of the war in Afghanistan. However, their exchange of nocturnal texts hides an inexplicable tension that could lead to a tragedy.
A somewhat experimental short film that is inspired by the principles of the theatrical space, this project depicts in a minimalist style the desperate attempt of two veterans to save themselves through friendship. The “clean” image that draws endless white space around and between the characters’ bodies is filled with carcasses of spoken and unspoken words. Despite the interior monologues that are intertwined in a “mute” dialogue, this white space cannot be tamed, since the great quality of this short film consists precisely in capturing that inherent, sub-textual silence hindering any attempt to create through words a bridge between individualities. Despite the risk of adopting a rather monotonous style in the first half, Tyler Mendelson manages to create an empathetic project that attacks a neuralgic subject. Thus, ‘In Between the White Space’ marks a sensitive experience, if not memorable or extremely original through the theme it attacks, then certainly intriguing through the filming formula chosen by the director.
TMFF RATING:
