Five Secrets to Mom
Video Essays
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Short Films, 13-Jun-2019
A teenager confesses five secrets to their mother on an anonymous online forum. Presented entirely as a screen capture of an old desktop computer, “Five Secrets to Mom,” by director Charles Dillon Ward, applies rudimentary digital tools in service of a modern teen admission, and the film alternates between darkly funny and weirdly unsettling. Inspired by a real thread found on Quora, Ward uses his own family photos, faces obscured by squiggles created in Microsoft Paint, and an automated voice that transforms vulnerable statements into blunt, awkwardly timed facts. The secrets start small (“I have drank alcohol before”) and become more revealing — intimate personal details filtered as automated archiving, mostly devoid of tone or context. -KA. Writer, Producer, Director, Editor: Charles Dillon Ward.
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