A ring of black text on a transparent background, reading 'Monday Short'.

Based on a True Story

If you're in need of a wholesome escape, Jacob Kafka's student short is a great place to get it. Silly, calm, and life-affirming, it's six well-spent minutes for the terminally overwhelmed.

A young girl stands on the surface of the sun, staring at a tall castle.

You know how sometimes you're in the middle of a stretch where it just seems like there's an endless list of tasks to do and no time to do them? So your brain keeps latching onto different items in your to-do list, but before it can get to them it remembers another detail of a different to-do, and so you don't feel like you're making progress on any of them? And so the world becomes a blur as you try to keep your head straight for at least a few minutes at a time?

Jacob Kafka's Based on a True Story is the opposite of that. It's sweet. It's silly. It's... honestly shocking that we haven't written about it here before. It's one of the first films that I (Peter, the guy who writes all these blog posts) saw at a GIRAF festival back in 2012, a year or so before I started working here, and there's something about its good-natured spirit, its calm sensibility, and the way fully embraces the power of belief that has made me associate it with Quickdraw. Plus Karilynn, GIRAF's programmer at that time, made the inspired move of pairing it with Noam Sussman's bizarre, slightly disturbing, and almost certainly NSFW one-minute short Güm, which is not at all calming but made for a brilliant pairing.

All of which is to say: if you're in need of a wholesome escape, Based on a True Story is a good place to get it. Light as it is, it's six well-spent minutes for the terminally overwhelmed.

BASED ON A TRUE STORY

dir: Jacob Kafka

syn: A little girl tries to dig to the moon, and has adventures along the way

2012