A Test
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A Test | Reviewed by Gaurav Dutta
“A Test”, a short film directed by Fella Cederbaum is a beautiful film of a duration of just seven minutes but relates to a lot of daily scenes we face at a personal level. The feeling of stress, fear, anxiety as life keeps giving us challenges constantly and we have to deal with them accordingly.
Things always do not go our way, instead our life and our problems keep deviating us from our goals, affecting us emotionally, physically and in a lot of different ways. Sometimes, we close off ourselves to the world and enter into our own worlds trying to fight away from these issues searching for our safe space, but meanwhile we just go a lot deeper into the sectors of our mind, that brings us to our depressive states. In the film we see a character named MahnoDahno, in an animated background of a barren land, where even the trees do not have leaves, where he sits and depicts all the life’s challenges we have to go through as life keeps slapping us with new things on a daily basis.
MahnoDahno, narrates life in a poetic sense, showing the struggles and how deeply it affects us, but the film’s main context and approach is to make aware of such struggles, and that we are not the only ones, rather everyone faces these daily. Instead of giving up to this and falling to their traps, we should be ready to adjust to every instance and circumstance, so that we can fight back constantly to these oppressing challenges. The motive of this film being to educate and create an awareness to every individual about being confident and fearless to any challenge life places towards us. Yes, sometimes we need time to adapt and adjust but we should learn to adapt and not stop adjusting and rather give up to the deep layers of our anxiety and overthinking behavior. Being calm and strong rather than aggressive and weak to the constraints of life is all this film has to say.
The animation and visualization of the scenes has been done beautifully with a small tint of animation connecting to the person being in reality. The film takes in the aspect of breaking the barriers depleting us of motivation and confidence in life. The sheer need for patience to withstand all the issues we go through every passing day. The need to aware individuals about this and how to deal with it.
Fella Cederbaum has taken a vivid and realistic concept and made it in to a short film to make every single soul notice its uniqueness and tragic effects on the people of all age groups living in this world. The film keeps narrating about the trap doors and visualizes the darkness as MahnoDahno is seen hanging from the branch of a barren tree and falls to the ultimate darkness where she comes to be not affected by the problems beside her and slowly slowly as per the circumstances makes her way back to the top, in a calm and composed manner making us believe that everything is possible and we should not be affected by these hurdles life puts in front of us.
The film contributes to us understanding the need and the value of being alone in life, but still not keeping a frown on our faces, but rather to fight back and win in any scene, its okay to lose or fail, but it is never okay to give up to such turmoils, as we all say where there is a path, there is a way.
