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“How Brief,” Kelly McCormack‘s Sundance-selected short film inspired by the music of vanished ’50s singer-songwriter Connie Converse, has unveiled a stirring teaser.
The cast of the short, which world premiered at Sundance on Sunday night and will next screen at Manchester Film Festival, includes Tess Degenstein (who also wrote the film), “She-Hulk” star Tatiana Maslany (who is serving on Sundance’s world cinema dramatic competition jury) and Gray Powell (“The Last Frontier,” “Brilliant Minds”). McCormack is a filmmaker and performer, known for their award-winning feature “Sugar Daddy” and acting credits including Eva Victor’s buzzy “Sorry, Baby,” Julio Torres’ “Problemista,” Amazon’s “A League of Their Own” and “George and Tammy” with Jessica Chastain.
“How Brief” is described as “a disappearing act set over the course of one night in 1962 when a restless woman returns to her childhood home for the last time,” according to its official synopsis. “Inspired by the music of singer-songwriter Connie Converse, and accompanied by the poetry of other women who have chosen to vanish, ‘How Brief’ explores one question posed to women: when is oblivion preferable to this life?”
Converse was active in New York City’s Greenwich Village scene in the ’50s and was one of the first to champion the singer-songwriter genre of music. In 1974, she left her family home and was never seen or heard from again.
Converse “wrote one haunting record in the 1950s, then engineered her own exodus,” McCormack says in their director’s statement. “To honor this radical act of self-determination and self-redaction, the short film felt like the appropriate format — told with as much luster and radiance as I could muster, while allowing our protagonist to evade us as she so desired.”
McCormack continues: The question that propelled this work was not why a woman would choose to disappear, but rather, why wouldn’t she? I wanted to capture all the terror and the glory that comes with accepting this fact. This film was the longest development process of my life, and at every step we took our time, lovingly building towards something short, as in Connie’s words, ‘like life, like your smile, like the fall of a leaf — how sad, how lovely, how short, how brief.'”
“How Brief” was produced by Ariel Bond, Lucy McNulty and Jill Orsten and was edited by Kane Stewart. Watch the teaser below.
English (US) ·