Portals

Sam and Mark live together and they've drifted apart. When Mark invites him out, Sam prefers to stay home.

He’s hiding something: Sam opens Grindr and meets up with Adam, who has his own ulterior motive - something he needs help with. He needs help to get to another world.

  • Gilbert Kemp Attrill
    Director
  • Gilbert Kemp Attrill
    Writer
  • Adam Daniel
    Producer
  • Lincoln Vickery
    Key Cast
    "Sam"
  • Zoran Jevtic
    Key Cast
    "Adam"
  • Marcus Whale
    Key Cast
    "Mark"
  • Project Type:
    Short
  • Genres:
    Sci-fi, Queer, Drama
  • Runtime:
    13 minutes 30 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    November 27, 2024
  • Country of Origin:
    Australia
  • Country of Filming:
    Australia
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
Director Biography - Gilbert Kemp Attrill

Gilbert is a filmmaker from South Australia and a graduate of the Adelaide College of the Arts and AFTRS. He’s made short films as writer and director, and gallery work including a video installation for Google Cube, presented by Google Creative Labs and Adelaide Fringe and 360° video work for VR headsets, presented by Novus Res at Sister Gallery.

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Director Statement

With ‘Portals’, I tried to put forward a hallucinatory vision of the world through an intimate and seemingly small story. The tight aspect ratio was chosen to emphasise this intimacy. The story of ‘Portals’ came to me at the beginning of the settled period of a long-term relationship - missing the feeling of romance, of discovering someone entirely new, and knowing that to pursue that feeling would pointlessly obliterate the precious thing we had, I recognised that I could, however, safely follow that feeling in a story.

At the story’s conclusion, Sam is trapped on the wrong side of a layer of glass, having lost something precious. That Mark and Sam’s house is surrounded by plants, which are revealed in the story to be a doorway to other worlds, I hope feels like a sad irony; that the abundance that Sam was seeking was already around him.

The production design contrasts a lived-in quality with a transient, temporary feeling; Mark and Sam’s house has history and personal artefacts, but Adam’s apartment is a blank slate, a stopping place - the only art on the wall is a calendar and a mirror with nothing reflected in it, and he sleeps in a sleeping bag. I have also drawn on video art of the 1970s and ‘80s for the visual treatment of the final ‘alien’ elements’: crude green screen, rough edges, bright colours, handmade collage. The encounter with novel (to the ’70s) video technology, and the rawness of discovery, marked by humour and even crude gestures, maps utopian potential onto this newness; I hope an alien world would be better than our own, but, of course, it would have its own sadnesses and shadows.

While one thread of the story implies a seductive, compelling risk to bodily integrity or life, Sam’s self-destructiveness is also risking a precious love. Then I tried to touch on the idea of vulnerability as making literal openings in oneself, and the addictive swirl of playfulness and desire and pain around the act of making a portal for someone else to enter you, even temporarily - the necessary vulnerability, and acceptance that love can shatter you.

Despite the sadness and irony, whether Sam’s pursuit of sensation is redundant and harmful, or the necessary fire that burns away the past in pursuit of utopia, is the question on which the end of the story pivots and doesn’t answer.