Film: What To Do When She's Gone

What to do when she's gone’ is a short, dramatic melodrama, arranged in an atemporal form, focusing on the response of a teenage girl to her mother’s death. Comprised of unsettling daydream scenarios, the girl remembers times with her mother, fantasising that she is still with her. The narrative is not only poetic but transcendent in storytelling and cinematography, focusing on the moving image as equal to the script. The first issue to overcome was writing a successful script. As Max Thurlow argues, “it is often said, write about what you know, I would amend that to say, better still, write about what moves you, your passions, dreams, and desires.” To do this, I wrote about a girl's desire and passion for her mother. ‘She’ is never given a name since inviting such a close intimate relationship between character and audience, the audience has no choice but to use “empirically based beliefs”' to vicariously invest the character with their own “fallible and innate perceptual mechanisms” to seeing not a nameless girl, but themselves. The character’s sheer vulnerability and introspective nature speaks to the audience.