Dominatrix Mara’s Cocoon, winner of the festival’s WTF Award, finds sensuality and psychological tension in water, nylon stockings, thin latex, flowers, and two women engaged in what the filmmaker describes as a dynamic metamorphosis.
Mara wanted the film to challenge the usual media treatment of kink and BDSM. Rather than framing intensity through aggression or spectacle, Cocoon uses minimal narrative to reveal ritual, restraint, devotion, objectification, and sensation. The result is less concerned with explaining itself than making the audience feel something it may not have language for.
The production moved fast. Mara storyboarded the film in six hours and shot it in roughly four to five, working with what she described as her first all-female cast. Her favorite moment arrives during the final transformation, when the camera moves across the ground and brings the audience into focus.
Watching it at the festival gave Mara a rare chance to see her own work on a large screen.
“The reactions are a bonus validation,” she said.
Graceann Dorse’s Le Meow Mort, meanwhile, won Best Use of Challenge with a freeze-dried cat and a worldview blacker than the bottom of a litter box.
The film originated with a Women in Comedy Festival challenge that supplied two opening lines: “Try hard. None of it matters.” Dorse took the nihilism seriously and went in a dry, vaguely Bergman-esque direction. The finished short follows characters pondering mortality under a monotone February sky at Coney Island.
“Life is like a litter box, full of turds one day, empty the next,” the film declares.
The one-day shoot was quick, collaborative, and unpaid. Its great behind-the-scenes struggle was not artistic disagreement or production chaos. It was parking at Coney Island. Dorse also had to vacuum sand from her dead cat’s fur afterward.
The festival …
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Author: Kyle Rosner / High Times
