We Blinded the Sun (2012)

“Everyone is missing something.”

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Sometimes, being a parent prevents me from enjoying things. Ok, perhaps it isn’t entirely fair to blame my impairment entirely on parenthood, there’s also my advanced age to consider.

So, I guess… being an old parent prevents me from enjoying things.

Take for instance the lovely film short We Blinded the Sun directed by Danielle Sahota, another Ryerson University film program student and 2012 Air Canada enRoute Film Festival award-winner for Achievement in Cinematography.

Sahota has made a beautiful piece about a young boy’s love for a cello. However, all I could think about during the 14-minute film short’s run time was whether the main character Marcel played by Thomas Goldhar was cold, wandering around a desolate snowscape in a soaking wet cable-knit sweater and dress slacks.

There are the scenes where Marcel is partially submerged in a bathtub filled with what appears to be filthy, brown water, while clasping a cello, or rather a replica of the beloved instrument. Then there are the sequences where he scrabbles around in some really lovely filth with his father played by Vladimir Jon Cubrt (The Lost Girl).

Again, the grizzled parent in me was screaming silently, “Someone grab a washcloth or even a spit-moistened Kleenex for that kid… or alternately, “He’s going to catch cold or get an ear infection.” Stop film. Stop film.

This breathy poem of a film short, with a haunting score by Heather Schmidt, is centred around world partially emptied by a Rapture-like event. (I assume). Those who haven’t ascended into the sky are left to mourn and apparently root around in the dirt. Marcel mourns, not of for his absent mother, but the cello that she played so beautifully she was accepted into the clouds.

As the film ended, I cast my mind back to my 17-year-old self who skulked around art galleries and watched avant-garde cinema in the flickering dark without the faintest twinge of motherly conscience.

She would have appreciated We Blinded the Sun. Mud, sooty faces, wet sweaters and all.

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14 minutes

Unrated