The short film, Baggage, began with black-and-white Super 8 footage in a style that is directly scanned from the film strip with unedited black spots and sprocket holes, and it’s framed with white strips and photo corners. In this section, someone received a package of an old-fashioned leather briefcase wrapped in the kraft paper. With their attire and face revealed later, this person is presumed to be a young woman. After the case was opened, a series of small objects—photos, boxes, glasses, paper, and a knife—were carefully displayed like a tiny cabinet of curiosity. She inspected the various objects lying inside. Inside a box, she found a unique small sculpture: a posable figure model with avian characteristics in its head and a skeleton of a wing. She also discovered a photo with this figure and a key. This figure and the key were key visual elements guiding this adventure throughout the film.
Instead of a still image, moving images in the similar style of the Super 8 footage are shown with an intricate photo frame in the center of this briefcase, showing a tramway passing by. The film cut to the full screen of this moving image, and the title “BAGGAGE” was engraved in the carriage of the tram as the title card. The film transformed into a colorful 3D animation with a high frame rate afterwards, in contrast to the Super 8 footage before. Filled with trippy purple and red colors, the animation seems to mainly be from the point of view of a person strolling along empty town streets at night. The streets have stone walls, short buildings, abandoned shops, wooden doors, lightened streetlights, and lightened signs. The woman was walking down the streets with the leather briefcase in her hand and peeking through the shop windows. On the TV screen, images of various baggage and the woman’s face are shown. She entered a hotel with a dead end and saw an eerie tableau of different moving puppets in a toy shop. Different piles of suitcases stood in front of empty shops and inside empty cars. These animations are overlaid with different footage of each other and live action. The discontinuity of dimensions and repeated elements visualized the inner journey of one visiting the museum of their personal fragmented memories from a long time ago. The residual stores are similar to the ruins of the emotional burden that piled up and was left behind throughout the years.
Followed by the sound of rain, she entered a forsaken cinema and soon found a matched photo for the one within the leather briefcase. Pushing through the door, she picked up the key from the photo in her hand by the side of a piano entangled by the branches. A tree of the small strange creatures, the same type as the sculpture in the briefcase, was caged behind the fence. With the key and the knife in the case, she set these avian creatures free. They flew into the sky with a warm hue of pink, blue, and orange, transforming the tone of the film with its sound and colors.
The film created an experimental and surrealistic visual language with the ambient music, Super 8 film, and excellent animation, showing someone walking down memory lane. The film chose to suspend any depiction of the actual traumas and used images of baggage and vintage objects to indicate the past. The old model of various objects tends to signify that the protagonist was someone who was born before the 1960s and looked back to their young self. The dark tone of this film accepts that the heaviness of the past and a woman could see herself in something unusual and otherworldly, like those eerie creatures that are not traditionally feminine. She freed herself by visiting the uncomfortable mental space and walking through the layers of barricades, which might not be as invincible as she expected. After all, the answer was in her hands.
The film was created by Deb Ethier of Rusty Bolt Theatre
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