Charlie Kaufman’s How to Shoot a Ghost is a woozy wander through a dreamy Athens.
Taking as its pretext the recent deaths of its two protagonists, the film is a meditation on life and death, on legacy and letting go. The film opens with a moody prologue, narrated by screenwriter Eva H.D., in which Anthi (Jessie Buckley) and Rateb (Josef Akiki) both live out their final hours. Each outsiders in their own way, they emerge onto the streets of Athens the next morning to find it transformed into a hypnagogic afterlife, where the pavements are filled with the dearly departed and they must wrestle with their own sense of legacy and our innate desire not to be forgotten. How to Shoot a Ghost premieres out of competition at this year’s Venice Film Festival.
Rateb was a translator working on a new translation of Thucydides, while Anthi was a photographer. Now, they are spirits, reckoning with their lives and mistakes and what it means to be remembered. Anthi takes polaroids of the other ghosts she encounters, and Kaufman and his editors Robert Franzen and Jon Daniel interject into the proceedings with splices of archival footage, creating a kind of trajectory into which we pass from tangible subject to flickers of light on celluloid. Rateb reflects on his own personal history and what he has left behind, while he walks around a hometown in which ancient history is ever present, and the dialogue between then and now is a constant.
All of this takes places in a fragmentary way, the pair come together and drift through this dreamscape, their conversations and musing only heard as voiceover and intermingled with Eva H.D.’s omniscient narrator. Michal Dymek photography emphasises the unreality, his camera hovering to hold the characters in close-up or the lens curving and distorting the image to send the rest of the world into a blur. In many cultures the act of remembrance is a act of service to those beyond the mortal realm – to lessen their time in purgatory, to lengthen their time in paradise. In How to Shoot a Ghost, there is something peaceful in allowing it all to slip away.
Director: Charlie Kaufman
Cast: Jessie Buckley, Josef Akiki, Eva H.D.
Screenplay: Eva H.D.
Producers: Isabelle DeLuce, Emily McCann Lesser
Cinematography: Michal Dymek
Editing: Robert Franzen, Jon Daniel
Sound: Lew Goldtsein
Music: Ella van der Woudei
Production design: Kim Jennings
Production companies: Unmade, Soft Focus Films, Monarch Kaleidoscope, Green Olive Films, Kanopy in association with Nightjar Films, Liaison Pictures with the support of Onassis Stegi with the participation of Athens Film Office, Municipality of Athens
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Out of Competition – Shorts)
In English
27 minutes
Read more of our short film coverage over at Verdict Shorts
