BY ELISABETH DONNELLY |
Super Shorts: The Elephant Garden
Sasie Sealy's beautiful short, which won the Student Visionary Award at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, gets into the head of a lovely young girl who's dealing with the awkwardness of sisterhood and blossoming sexuality.
Sasie Sealy's short The Elephant Garden won a Student Visionary Award at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2008. In fact, it was Sealy's second win of a Student Visionary Award, one she also took in 2005 with her short Dance Mania Fantastic (about an out-of-work guy who spends his days playing Dance Dance Revolution; it looks wonderful).
The Elephant Garden is gorgeously shot (Sealy's biography mentions work with photographer Gregory Crewdson; you can see that influence here) in a color-soaked North Carolina, and it follows an eleven-year-old girl, Chloe (Kelley Mack), whose world of childhood slowly fractures as her beloved older sister Elisabeth (Elise Couture) gets a boyfriend (the spooky-eyed Billy Magnussen) and shuts her out of their universe. Sealy captures the hazy feel of childhood, and how it conflicts with the burgeoning mysteries of the world; you feel, greatly, for Chloe's newfound loneliness, and you get in her head.
Sealy's upcoming projects include her first feature, SarahN_12. Her screenplay is based on a story by Mark Heyman, who is currently gaining some notoriety for also penning the Natalie Portman-and-Mila Kunis-do-ballet (and, um, each other) feature, Darren Aronofsky's next work, Black Swan.