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Two ex-lovers cross paths at a train station. A selection of Short of the Week, the web's leading curators of quality short films. ✨ JOIN US ON SHORTVERSE: 🎬 SUBMIT A FILM: Soft Animals Dir. Renee Zhan Unexpectedly bumping into your ex has to be one of the weirdest situations someone can face. So when Alice and Teddy see each other at a train station, their brief encounter is emotionally charged with all the memories of their past relationship. We are super excited to welcome back to the website (for a fifth time!) festival darling and multiple-time S/W alum Renee Zhan with her 2021 hit Soft Animals. While the film is centered around the actual interaction between these former lovers, what Zhan actually captures is all the emotional baggage that unravels because of their encounter, or as the director puts it the “strange, unexpected, and powerful feelings that bubble up to the surface”. As we’ve become to expect from Zhan’s work, their interaction is not depicted in a rational way, their chance meeting quickly becoming more of an animalistic affair. With the conversation they’re having almost irrelevant when compared to the physical manifestation of their interaction. What starts with awkwardness, moves on to all the memories they share and where both their minds go during that moment. Like the line from the Mary Oliver poem that the short’s title was inspired by explains, ‘you only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves’. - S/W Curator, Céline Roustan FULL REVIEW: Reproduced on this channel with the permission of the filmmakers.
