That moment before puberty... it's as if you were falling down a bottomless pit, only you know you're, someday soon, going to hit the bottom. It's out of time, out of mind, of the body, a foreign body. Your body... That, in a nutshell, is Ian Lagarde's short film Daybreak.
For those of you who saw Denis Côté's Vic + Flow Saw A Bear, you may recall Lagarde's name as he was the cinematographer of that film. But in addition he's been amassing a nice little body of work as director with Daybreak taking the crown. Premiering at Toronto in 2013, I caught the film at Slamdance last January, where it went on to win their top short film prize. And for good reason. It was easily the best short I saw in Park City, and quite possibly the best film period I laid eyes on there. The fact that I'm still ruminating on it nearly 10 months later just proves its staying power.
Charting an afternoon during the hazy, humid summer of a gang of pre-teen children in Suburbia, Lagarde's film finds that fine line between fantasy and reality that so many adults forget, merely because they want to articulate about it with words, and well... that is nearly impossible. Lagarde goes there though, and the results are sensitive to a time when everything seems equally brutal and fragile, as if you're screaming from inside a glass jar. And you know that glass is going to break, and you'll get cut. And you'll cut others. But you don't want that. You just want to ride your bike and play with your friends. Are they your friends though? And really, who are you?
Daybreak is embedded below.
Watch This Short Now: DAYBREAK, A Stunning, Violent Look At Pre-Teen Life