Our fifth annual short-film festival really moves
Film of the year
Everything In Between
DIRECTED BY ROGER MCCORD
A lyrical, reflective look at his family in everyday moments, Everything In Between is the product of Roger McCord's effort to focus on real life and real priorities amid the craze of modern life. McCord stitches together scenes from "a three-month period where the camera was always running" in his home, with clips from home movies of his own childhood in a family of nine children in Connecticut, and readings of McCord's own writings by his wife, Su Sepples. It makes for a sweet (but not saccharine) meditation on what is truly important in this world: "What sticks in the mind are those high points and red-letter days. Do the math, though, and we see that life consists mostly of common events — so that the pages of our book are mostly filled with ordinary stuff . . . the remarkable abundance of everything in between."
Soundtracked with music from his son's band, Faster! Faster!, the film does include special times, like searching for the perfect Christmas tree, his son's high school graduation, and the first moments after his daughter got her driver's license. But it mostly pieces together moments that happen all the time, like his daughter on the phone passing along a message to her brother about needing to come home "for snow removal," and a hilarious — for its poignant normality —sequence in which his son, still damp from the shower, races down the stairs half-naked, carrying his clothes, and jumps in the back seat of the car so he can get dressed on the ride to church.
JEFF INGLIS
