Retrieval

The short film opens with a woman emerging from the ocean on horseback at night. The beach is empty and the woman is wearing a red dress. The woman journeys through a city street, through her past memories, searching for something. She’s transported into a neglected memory of her younger self being assaulted. As she confronts this memory, she saves her younger self and brings her out of the stuck place, where she has been frozen in time.

The film follows the process of a soul retrieval, the red-clad woman going back in time to retrieve part of herself from where it had been severed, to re-write a memory of something painful that had happened to her. It uses fantastical and realistic elements to conduct a healing process for the characters and viewers.

Holding the line between magic, fantasy, and grounded reality, the film asks the question: what sight of miraculous intervention do we need to conduct to seam together such a violent rupture?

Directed by Fatimah Asghar (USA)