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The New Yorker may be Wes Anderson's favourite magazine, inspiring his latest The French Dispatch as well as providing him with endless joy in his childhood, but these days it's also a great platform for indie cinema, featuring films from around the world that don't fit into the feature length format.
The latest of these is Lebanese-American filmmaker Darine Hotait's haunting and powerful Tallahassee which tackles the issue of mental illness in an family from the Arab diaspora. Written by Hala Alyan, who also stars in the film as Mira, the short film opens on the day of her release from a psychiatric facility, when she returns to her mother’s home in Brooklyn to attend her grandmother’s birthday. There, Mira discovers that her sister, played by American-Palestinian filmmaker Cherien Dabis, has told the family that she was on a trip in Florida, instead of in an institution. As the film's synopsis points out "Tallahassee is the portrayal of a young woman’s re-entry into the world, a meditation on the enormous task of life after grief. Framed in the context of diaspora, this film grants a glimpse into the struggles of mental illness, an issue often silenced and pathologised in Arab culture."
To watch it in full, check out The New Yorker magazine.
