Stain | Short Film of the Day

Short Film of the Day April 22, 2021

Stain

By Eli Speigel with 7.4

drama · Short Films · english

The film packs a complete punch of humour, absurdity and the complete immersion of the viewer within its narrative. It bemuses you, and deliberately so, as it takes you into a day in Miles' life who wakes up to find a stain on his otherwise perfectly clean bedsheet.

Amidst the lovely flamingos in the shade of the most aesthetically pleasing pink, rests a spot of a dirty brown-red. Thus begins Miles' bewilderment in unpacking the cause and reasons behind it.

For the viewer who frequently engages with creative content, the instinct is to look for metaphors, symbolism and hidden meanings within this seemingly complex narrative. However this pursuit of meaning, this fixation with making sense of a regular story unfolding before you is no different from Miles' fixation with the stain. It is then in this manner that the protagonist and the viewer not only reach a space of overlap, but perhaps also doom themselves to the same fate of uncertainty, in a world where absurdity reigns free, even in the face of all our desperate attempts to look for order, patterns or sense in the functionings of a possibly arbitrary universe.
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Early in my first year at university, (one day) upon finally stripping my fitted sheet, I saw a sizeable blood stain on the mattress protector. I was shocked as I had no idea where it came from.

The action of this short film is the product of what was going through my mind before I realized the origin of the stain. The film came out the way it did because I only know how to write what I know... and then exaggerate and warp it until it can push a theme and comment on some bigger questions… and get a laugh or two. I like to remind people that oftentimes we do not get answers to the questions in our life, and oftentimes the pursuit of answers just leads to more questions.
Eli SpeigelDirector, Stain