My Name Is Beth

Alternately heart-breaking and heart-warming, My Name Is Beth is a recursive tale of familial conflicts and their intergenerational consequences. Its looping is a consequence of chronology, but as a function of time rather than time-travel. The line it traces through a family tree may be branching, but it bears bitter(sweet) fruit.

Screening at Glasgow's 2023 Short Film Festival as part of the Young Scottish Filmmaker awards, this has a quality that belies that it's a first film. A view clearly shared by the jury, who awarded it the £1000 prize. Director Sayee Gogate and writer Alice Clarke have constructed something that shows a willingness to dig in, to dig deep, and harvest the results.

The judges mentioned its use of a "fantastic location" and its cast, and those are fair to praise. Barbara Horne and Leah Balmforth have good chemistry, and as their reactions to each other evolve we learn more about what has catalysed their meeting. In delicate circumstances the film benefits from a careful touch. I'm not sure how many outside Scotland will understand the remoteness that "all the way from Fife" conveys, but the house in which it is set has been well prepared to make clear a particular nature of neglect.

Beth has come to the house to see Verity. She's more than one reason to do so, more than one need to do so, and there's more than one reaction too. I was minded of Oscar-nominated short An Irish Goodbye. not as much because of somewhat rural parallels but the focus on a family and its changing response to grief and its associated traumas. The home itself is not stately, but progress here is gentler than its status as a short suggests. It paces its revelations well, step by step by (door)step.

The competition has two broad categories, for films made without and (as here) with support. Its equivalent winner was Practice, which also showed high quality though from an individual. The process of filmmaking becomes differently personal as more people become involved, and while Gogate and her team did have support from various bodies the credit is still hers (and theirs).

Depending on how online you are, or buried deep in filmic discourse, you may not know of the Bechdel test or the accepted wisdom that scripts should not have scenes of women talking. That last has seen some significant counters, not least in Women Talking. The former is based on a comic from 1985 and to be frank (Miller) it's a measure of how stagnant (if not regressive) film can be that 40-year-old things are still relevant. Here there's plenty of conversation, indeed by the Mo Movie Measure all but two of the dialogues pass. That's to reduce something heart-felt to cold equations, which is to do it a disservice. In a tale of blood and tomato soup there's much going on unsaid, more than what can be read, and all the heartier for it.