One of microcinema's treasures is the joy of discovering nuance just beneath its surface on repeat viewings. Much like the delight you experience upon discovering a new instrumental flourish buried within your favorite song after revisiting it, the comparable brevity of a short film sharpens its audience's senses, refocusing them to engage with, and pick up, new details. A short film's runtime tacitly demands a heightened level of awareness from its viewers, knowing there's only so much time to tell its story. You can always hit “repeat,” though.
Erin Granat glides across the 395 highway in Sacred Shit.
On such repeat viewings, the impishly clever hide of Sacred Shit wears away, its clever skin belying its truer nature: a meditation on friendship, dependency & loss. Filmmakers Machete Bang Bang & Erin Granat (dear friends of mine for transparency’s sake), weave their individual talents together to express their own unique artistic stake in the process, while never sacrificing the volume of either voice to placate the other. Without spoiling the film’s revelatory ending, it’s clear that this sense of mutual collaboration speaks to more than simply the mechanics of making art, but a deeper need for each friend to support the other in the face of mortality and its humorless smile. Life, after all, has a runtime too, though we never know how long we’ve got until it’s too late to demand a repeat button. Now that’s some “sacred shit.”
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Credits:
Starring: Erin Granat, Machete Bang Bang & John Weselcouch as "Friend on Phone"
Created by Machete Bang Bang and Erin Granat
Edited by Machete Bang Bang
Sound Design & Mix by Tim McKeown
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