In This Short Life

Shot with a mixture of professional and nonprofessional actors including the filmmaker herself in the intimate blackandwhite palette of older home movies In This Short Life works the blurry margin between documentary and fiction The film follows four mysteriously intertwined lives in Portland Ore and Los Angeles an elderly woman ambivalently embarking on an affair a mentally unstable man being evicted from his home a frustrated actor waiting for his breakthrough and a young female artist forced by a muchdesired yet inconvenientlytimed pregnancy to reassess the priorities in her life