"Remind me to never ride the subway in this town."
If it isn’t easy to make a feature film come across as a fine piece of artistry, imagine how hard it is to make a 12-minute short do likewise. Mandi Riggi, however, manages to pull it off with Parallel Passage, a short film about Carly (Sara Rivas), a brokenhearted woman who seems to be channeling for a serial killer.Nominated for the Best Short Film category at the Deauville Film Festival, Riggi’s flick manages to lay on the nightmarish imagery really thick, without making the film seem at all pretentious or unrealistic. Part of the credit for this goes to her lead, who manages to impart a whole lot of storytelling without actually saying a word.
Mind you, lots is said by other people in this dark little world of weird. In fact, despite the fact that Carly seems to be going stark raving loony, she’s by far the sanest person on the block. If obese guys in undershirts aren’t humping her from behind, old men on the subway are meowing like kittens, as filthy women bum cigarettes. In fact, maybe this isn’t a make believe world after all. I mean, have you ever lived in Cincinnati? I could tell you stories…I’d be lying if I said I understood this film from start to finish, and even now I struggle to patch together the entire meaning of the piece, but in terms of pure cinematic vision, and especially as this is her first film of any kind, there can be little doubt that Mandi Riggi is one to watch.
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