With pressure to keep quiet about a friend’s indiscretion, a boy is forced to deal with his secret head-on as the victim’s sister walks into his shop.

Director’s Vision

As an artist, I’m interested in the slowness and subtlety of life. I find it thrilling to explore the tensions of relationships, environments, and self that bubble below the surface. GUTS is a slow burn that plays with perception through point-of-view. By exploring a convoluted conflict like second-hand guilt with a distant lens, the audience’s desire to understand is enough to experience that very tension that our protagonist experiences himself. Sometimes we can’t put words to our feelings and sometimes empathy makes guilt contagious. Whether or not the details of Harry’s secret become completely clear, we can share in his struggle between compassion and loyalty, we can absorb some of the same guilt that he’s absorbed, and we can feel what he’s feeling. GUTS is about the tension and stresses we bury inside and how they grow to inform our specific experiences of life.

GUTS was written as a proof of concept for a feature film and adapted to be self-contained as a short. We shot it on a shoe-string budget and favours over the course of an extra-long, 25 hour day. The two locations were an hour apart and since the bulk of the shooting had to be through the night while businesses were closed, we built two completely different crews so that only the director, producer, DP, and lead actor worked the entire, long night.