IN THE JAM JAR | Omeleto Drama

An elderly woman reflects on her son.


IN THE JAM JAR is used with permission from Colin Nixon. Learn more at https://h264distribution.com/en/films....


Joan is in her 80s and is approaching the end of her life. As she makes her way through the days, she contemplates her relationship with her 50-year-old son Dan, from his early days as a baby to her marriage to Dan's father to their more distant relationship as adults.

Dan, too, mulls over the presence of his mother in his life after she passes. He looks for signs of her after her death, hoping to find them in even the oddest of places -- and discovering that even when she's gone, she still makes her presence and love felt in the small, delicate details of life.

Directed and written by Colin Nixon, this meditative, profound short film creates an uncommon intimacy with a mother and a son as they confront questions of mortality, love and family. With a muted, somber naturalism in the visuals, the film does have its moments of sadness and sorrow. But it also possesses an exceptional depth in its calmly straightforward acceptance of death, becoming a moving tribute to enduring maternal love.

Exceptionally well-written, the film is not a conventional story that immerses viewers into an illusion of reality as it happens. Instead, the format of the narrative is much like a letter addressed to a loved one. The storytelling is driven by its voiceover, in which we first hear Joan before she passes, and then Dan after Joan's death. Opening with an image of jam in a jar, with a black screen opening up a circle framing the top of the jar, viewers listen as the voiceovers sift through memories of the moments and insights that make up Joan and Dan's lives, both together and apart.

As Joan and then Dan speak, images stream through the circular frame, almost like a microscope lens that invites us to look closer at the small, ordinary yet meaningful details of life, from washing a baby in a sink to finding the nail clippings of a spouse after he dies. These moments are brought to life with great understatement and sensitivity by actors France Castel and Alain Goulem, who rarely share a frame and yet evoke the durable connection between a parent and child.

The images, like the language of the narration, are seemingly plain, modest and straightforward, imbued with a rueful wry humor at times. But as these pictures and moments accumulate, along with meditations on memory and love that murmur underneath them, the alchemy of cinematic storytelling imbues the ordinary with a poetic beauty that's as tender as Joan's love for her son.

Realizing the depth of that love is Dan's journey, which brings IN THE JAM JAR to its close. It's a cliche to talk about the circle of life perhaps, but the film truly comes back around to its starting point, back to the jam jar that offered a Proustian jumping-off point in the first place. But viewers can't help but be affected by the journey as well, and perhaps will be inspired to look at the ordinary details of their lives with their loved ones -- and realize just how meaningful and extraordinary it all is.