“The Anniversary” by Davide Serra

“The Anniversary” is a roughly unique short film in every aspect. With great courage and a cinematographic sense, the director Davide Serra manages to upset the archetypes that until a moment before seemed to have embraced. The film seems to be the fuse of an explosive ready to explode in the surprising and hilarious ending that reaches the spectator completely unexpected. Serra is in fact very good at loading the narrative tension and apparently diverting the viewer towards his expectations, based on well-established moral and narrative conventions. Demonstrating a fine and sensitive connoisseur of human rules, Davide Serra overturns them in a few seconds, granting us an incredible (but absolutely plausible) solution, which appears to be a liberation, an affirmation of the independence of the choices.

In this sense, the short film also becomes a subtle reflection on cinema, archetypes and narrative construction. It is no coincidence that the film seems to be structured on certain aesthetic references of the western/historical genre and then completely disregard the dictates of language to arrive at an authorial solution. Brilliant.