NSFW: Violence

GIRLFRIENDS from Travelling distribution on Vimeo.

There’s something of a joke in my shorts screening committee at the queer film festival. The committee head wants to see queer people fall in love and learn about themselves while I want to see us kill each other. In that light, I fell in love with Marie Davignon’s lesbian thriller Amies (aka Girlfriends). This short hooked me right from the beginning with an opening credits homage to Michael Haneke’s Funny Games. It’s a tense savage thriller about 3 teenage girls who are in a lovers’ triangle reunited after one returns from college to bounce around the countryside during summer vacation.

Amies is a film about friendship and destruction, sex and jealousy, and a complicated galaxy of teenage emotion when romance is still fawning and new. The savageness at the heart of this short is one of the most thrilling feelings that also completely deflates the viewers. The faint of heart need not apply.