The Endless Burden

This film looks gorgeous, something to be expected of the NZBS. While the story is not the most original concept that has cropped up around the ideas of time travel, the acting and delivery is awesome, and I would expect to see it make the city finals.

Overall, this film looked amazing visually. This cinematography was simple but so effect for the story. Loved the use of silhouettes to tell the story. Got a good performance from the actors and the tension built up for the ending

Solid acting and a good take on the time travel genre, edit was a little slow but overall a great film

Another very strong film out of NZBS. Good story idea. Well peformed and directed. The highlight for me was the silhouette style imagery. I look foward to seeing this again. Likely at the city final.

Charlie, who suffers from a time-travel condition, is interviewed by the authorities. Although simple and talky, the performances were so convincing in this short that the audience was thoroughly engaged for the duration. Beautifully shot, edited and executed this film could easily make the city finals. Great work!

In this competition, if you think you've latched onto a pretty interesting idea, it's rarely a bad strategy to just stick to your guns and make that idea the entire focus of your film. And so it is with this effort, a noirish time travel tale set entirely within an interrogation room, telling its story in a single scene. The first thing that stood out to me (in a good way) were the performances. Hammy acting is a hallmark of 48HOURS, so it's always refreshing to see actors taking the harder route, focussing on just playing their role dead straight. No winks to the audience here, just two people working a scene together. It's interesting to note that the actors were surely much younger than the implied ages of the characters they were portraying; normally I find this sort of thing (e.g. the classic high school boys in oversized suits playing gangsters) distracting, but surprisingly it didn't bother me too much here - again, I guess the focus of the scene eclipsed these more literal concerns. The time traveller character actually went one step further and mentioned his age as being 50 (I think? 60?), and I'm glad they didn't take the ill-advised step of trying to age-up with crappy make-up or hair (actually, I vaguely had the thought that a guy who looks young but is actually old was maybe a consequence of the way this particular flavour of time travel works, although that was never quite made clear). Despite its fixed and mostly undetailed location, there were still a few nice cinematic touches. The standout was the shot of the guy remembering an old relationship, and we saw this memory play out in the silhouettes of two figures in the background. It was an elegant piece of composition and of cinematic storytelling. And more generally, the lighting and sound contributed well without drawing attention to themselves. If I had just one complaint to lay at the storytelling here, it would be that everything just felt a wee bit too 'generic'. Which is to say that I felt like I'd seen these characters before, I'd heard the bones of this story before. Which is not by itself a problem, but the lack of any additional specificity to distinguish itself, be it in the details of how time travel works (e.g. Back To The Future's wonderfully arbitrary 88mph rule) or perhaps in notable quirks of the characters, meant that the story didn't stick around for long in my mind after the credits had rolled. One simple example of this was the closing line, which I gather was also spoken right at the beginning, to imply a time-loop of some sort. Trouble was, the line itself was so generically worded that I didn't actually recall whether it had been uttered previously, and I had to simply assume that was the case based on the way it played out - again, specifically helps lock things down firmly in our memory, gives up helpful signposts to hang onto. But for a 48HOURS film these are pretty minor quibbles, and overall I appreciated the team's commitment to their conceit, which turned out to be a sort of nihilistic sibling to The Time Traveller's Wife. In particular, the choice to anchor the time travel setup in the vagaries of human emotion meant that the tale was always going to be centred on its characters (rather than getting obsessed about any finnicky sci-fi specifics), which served it well I think.