March 1, 2010: The Door
The Door, an Oscar-nominated live-action short film from Ireland running 17 minutes, opens with a man on a motorcycle approaching an abandoned fairground, with military guys chasing him through this otherwise deserted landscape. He steals a door from a house, strapping it to his motorcycle and riding away.
What’s this all about? The viewer’s confusion at the start is obviously intentional, as the next sequence helps us to understand but still doesn’t quite spell it out. The man, obviously some time earlier, is packing up with his wife and daughter to leave their home admid the sound of sirens in a forced evacuation, with the man repeatedly telling his daughter that they are not allowed to take anything with them. Somewhere around this point it became clear to me that the issue was radiation, and I guessed (from the language and decor) that this was Chernobyl, which indeed it was.
When after a short time away the daughter dies from radiation exposure, the man wants to uphold their cultural tradition and lay her out on a door (the man’s father had the same treatment on the very same door years ago). This leaves him with no choice but to go into the contaminated and evacuated area to retrieve the front door of his house in order to give his daughter a proper burial. He was forced to steal the door from his own house.
In a voiceover, the man expresses that “that day we didn’t just lose a town, we lost our whole world”. Never for a moment do we doubt that he will always live with this painful truth.
It’s based on a true story.
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