“Remember Me” is a mild short-short film from Portland, Oregon-based filmmaker Mark Willner which attempts to cover a great deal of ground in the span of sixty seconds. Although the result is not quite as profound as the filmmaker would like to have the audience believe, kudos are nonetheless in order for the attempt to work within such a highly restricted time span.
Basically, “Remember Me” is a poem about the symbols that assure the dead receive some degree of immortality, perhaps suggesting greater respect is paid to the dead rather than to the living. A visual collage of photographs, historic artwork and computer graphics depicting cemeteries, skeletons and popular concepts of heading to Heaven buzz about the screen while British actress Emma Jones reads the text with far too much seriousness. And that’s about it…to grab the title from a Nicholas Cage flick, it is literally gone in sixty seconds. Not really a deep intellectual challenge, but at the same time it is not such a bad little film and it is far more diverting than many short films currently filtering through the Internet or festivals.
In fairness, the film is professionally conceived and produced using four different computer programs (Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects and Premiere) before being transferred to MiniDV across a FireWire connection. And filmmaker Willner is making a crusade to turn out more one-minute movies, operating under the desire “to create the feeling of wanting more.” Whether more can be achieved with less is open to debate, it will be intriguing to see what future micro-mini-movies can be created by this original artist within such tight parameters.
