Paper Kids (Short)
Not a single word is spoken throughout the 21 minutes of Shane Ryan’s “Paper Kids.” That’s both to the film’s benefit, but also to its detriment, because we are left to infer much. Instead, we simply get images of teenagers, some together, some alone, all sullen. In his credit, he calls this “A portrait by Shane Ryan,” and that’s a pretty good description of what we’re watching. For the first half of the film, the actions the teens do have little meaning- we are simply to watch their faces. We see pain, we see contentment, but we don’t appear to see happiness. The lives on screen do not appear happy, which becomes very clear when the tone of the music takes on a harder edge, and the images become bolder. We see some of these teens brandish guns and bullets, some get naked, and some show signs of cutting. Eventually, we get words on screen that show us a clear sense of where the title comes from- all of these teens are missing. It feels an inevitable truth has been revealed, but that doesn’t make it any less powerful. The film is a tone poem rather than a piece of narrative cinema, and it’s a bit more difficult to pull off. Ryan does quite a good job, because the images in his film sear themselves into our brain, and will be difficult to shake.
