Talk To You is an experimental documentary short based on a series of voicemails director Zack Grant discovered from his late grandfather, Gerald Grant, years after his death. Exploring the tension of childhood nostalgia and adult regret, the film guides viewers through a re-creation of grandfather Grant’s home through a cautious and unfamiliar lens. Shot in one practical four-minute take, Talk To You invites the audience to consider their own family and how the feelings behind their relationships change with time, age and death.
Gerald Grant passed away at the age of 82 in 2012. Four years after his death, Zack Grant in the midst of restoring his phone, uncovered a batch of old voicemails that his grandfather left him during the last six months of his life. Zack Grant recalled, “As a child and even an adolescent, these voicemails were fun and charming. And while the nostalgia certainly remains, now as an adult, my grandfather’s messages paint a picture of a lonely man and his grandchild who didn’t realize the extent of his grandfather’s isolation.”
Talk To You, Zack Grant’s self-funded indie project, provides food for thought on familial relationships, the ways they evolve and how their meaning can be lost and then again found.
Talk To You makes its debut online today (12/10) on the indie short film platform Retrospective of Jupiter.
Zack Grant is an alum of SHOOT’s 2019 New Directors Showcase.