“Calf Rope” by Bradley Hawkins

“Calf Rope” is the nostalgic portrait of the encounter between two generations, narrated with tenderness by the talented Bradley Hawkins.
The film, despite being a short film lasting just 28 minutes, has the taste of an epic journey, like a story that began a long time ago and is destined to never end. The power of “Calf Rope” is in fact in the ability to be universal, while telling the intimate relationship between a grandfather and his grandson. Hawkins has the experience and creativity to give the right directorial touch to the narration: so this imaginative journey in the 60s drags the viewer with naturalness and amazement. The virtuosity of some camera movements is never a simple exercise in style, but has its exact location in the breadth of the story.

The film is traversed by a stylistic and narrative grace, which makes the film a familiar place for everyone, a place of memory, capable of stimulating the personal experience of each spectator. Photography contributes to creating this sense of profound human feeling, which has already been skilfully traced by the script. Following a long American narrative tradition, the film is a glimpse of time, the nostalgic story of a vanished America, of which traces remain in men, in memories, in emotions. Hawkins’ gaze is full of a perceivable love for the characters and the places narrated. So the nature that surrounds some memorable scenes becomes part of the narration, it evokes a personal, intimate and pleasant world, also thanks to the excellent scenography of the interiors.  In this film, death becomes an extreme act of reconciliation with memory, as if all beautiful things were destined to be better in our memories.
An indelible film, capable of finding space in the mind and heart of the spectators and becoming living matter.