MicroCinema Scene

Many would call Bill Kersey’s Solace a music video, but it does what the genre often fails to convey most of the time: it establishes an emotional connection. Solace does in three minutes what a regular feature should do in a hour and a half. It recounts the story of a man who goes through life playing his guitar; a man dealing with both happy and sad moments via his music.

It is a fine example of how a moviemaker can do so much with so little. The concept is simple as it is structured around one instrumental guitar song. The story is told without dialogue, relying only on a solid montage of still photographs, depicting the different phases of the man’s life in chronological order, starting as a kid (even then with his guitar.) This is something I respect very much: To be able to tell a story without the aid of dialogue, titles or any other expositional devices aside from the images.

Solace doesn’t have any extraordinary events, save a single tremendous one that takes up a huge portion of the piece. But at the end, the piece is just about life and that’s the beauty of it. The film works at all levels, whether you review it as a music video, a documentary or a drama. It also happens to have the right length; at 3 minutes, 36 seconds Solace is a simple yet very concise and effective short film.

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