Rob Munday

When you’re young, peer pressure can make you do stupid things to fit in with the “cool” kids. In Kathy E. Mitrani’s immersive short film Buzzkill, we’re invited to spend time hanging with a group of Floridian teenagers as they play games in a pool they’re not supposed to be in. At 11-minutes in length, Mitrani’s film feels more interested in authenticity and evocation than stringing out a particularly novel narrative and the result is utterly captivating, its approach making you feel as if you’re part of this group of adolescents, free from the responsibilities of adulthood.

Introducing us to its young protagonist as she sits on a balcony, we share her gaze as she spots a quartet of fellow teenagers making their way along the street below. As she pursues the group into a carpark and spies on them from a distance, again it’s her perspective that starts to give us an inclination of where her curiosity is aimed. As her pursuit of the clique leads her to be invited into their inner circle, that desire to be included leads her and her younger sister into a dangerous situation.

“My curiosity and the wave of influence around me tended to get me in trouble very quickly and suddenly”

With Mitrani writing her short during a particularly nostalgic period in wintery New York, the director explains that she was “remembering how my curiosity and the wave of influence around me tended to get me in trouble very quickly and suddenly”. With these mental souvenirs forming the basis of her plot, the filmmaker also wanted to tap into the “little seeds of queer curiosity” that were germinating inside of her, but were somewhat buried at the time.

In terms of what Mitrani was hoping to achieve with her short, the director reveals that she thought it was “more important to make a film that put the audience in the shoes of teenagers”, rather than hypothesise on the grander themes she was exploring. “Subjectivity and immersivity were important for me”, says Mitrani. “Being a teenager is such an intense experience I felt it would be more appropriate to create a film that would encapsulate the feeling of being that age rather than trying to create a story that would explain the feeling”.

That enveloping approach is also evident in the filmmaking approach of Buzzkill, with kinetic handheld 16mm photography and first-time performers key in achieving the genuine tone of Mitrani’s short. For the cast, the filmmaker originally turned to the streets of Miami to find her performers, but had difficulties due to the suspicions around a “no name director” trying to hire teenagers to be in their film. In the end, she looked closer to home for actors and ended up hiring her cousins to play the two leads and as a happy accident, their real-life experiences helped shape the narrative.

“We brought the 16mm camera underwater which was a very exciting first for me” – Mitrani on shooting at the pool location.

With everyone in front of the camera a first-timer, Mitrani decided that this should in no way be considered a negative or a hinderance and instead turned it into a positive, by opening the door for a lot of improvisation on set. “The lack of structure was really exciting for me because it put us all in a place where we had to create on the fly both with camera and the actors”, she explains, before adding that she found that “a lot of magic happens when we’re purely running off of our intuition”. Visually, 16mm was chosen for the “palpable” nature it brought to the aesthetic, with both Mitrani and her DP Logan Triplett drawn to the format’s “ability to render color in natural light” and how this would amplify the short’s immersive, subjective qualities.

Ultimately, Mitrani’s short is a coming-of-age piece centred around themes of sexuality and identity. From that description you can probably deduce that it wasn’t the originality of the storytelling that we found so appealing in Buzzkill, but instead it was the filmmaking approach that really drew us in. Narratively, this isn’t a short doing anything new, but it presents such a universal, relatable storyline with such style, energy and allure that it felt like a film impossible to ignore.

As a 40-something year-old man, I’m never going to know what’s it’s like to be a teenage girl, but Buzzkill lets me live the experience for 11-minutes!