Have you ever wished that you could return to a particular moment in your past, and thought that if only things had gone differently that day, the whole trajectory of your life would have been better? That is the plight of Lyzie, a depressed young woman who appears to have substance use problems, played tenderly in the elegant French sci-fi short 8/20/2008 by filmmaker Lucie Ballery. Most of us, as we age, probably realize that this sort of time travel wouldn’t solve all of our life’s problems, and that it may even hinder some of our growth and resilience. Lyzie isn’t quite there yet. I feel like that’s part of what the film is about: her being too young to have fully processed and accepted a devastating loss, and to have envisioned and built a life for herself without her deceased parents.
8/20/2008 is the day in her life when Lyzie experienced the terrible accident that took her parents away from her. After spiraling into a deep pit of depression, she wakes up in a nostalgic light on a beach that day where she was camping with her parents. The young actress’s face is so sad and vulnerable when she sees her parents alive again and crumples into tears that it’s a viscerally painful moment. She re-visits that afternoon again, supposedly as a child playing with her own friends, though she still appears in the film as a young adult (which is very telling). Lyzie never grew past that day, literally and figuratively. The film’s storytelling is a little loose, but I feel like it belongs to that genre of “time loop” time travel movies in way, with the twist being that the loop is an emotional cycle that the central character was never able to break.
Watch 8/20/2008 for FREE in Shorts Block No. 5 of the virtual festival, running through 11/3!
https://watch.eventive.org/mentalfilmness2024/play/6704b2b8dd02d60047462b6c
I think about going back in time A LOT. If only…