Out of the Blue, Into the Black (2017)

Directed by: Alidor Dolfing | 21 minutes | thriller, short film | Actors: Laurens Aneca, Klaas Duyck, Verona Verbakel​

The 16-year-old Flament gets locked in a Dixie during a music festival. ​When a storm breaks out and he is seriously injured, he has to fight for his life.​
Out of the Blue, Into the Black opens in the Dixie, with a heavily vomiting Flament, followed by an acute diarrhea attack. He is sweating and toiling on the toilet when he finds out that there is only one sheet of toilet paper left.​

You empathize with him and the misery splashes off the screen. In the background you can hear the sounds of a music festival. His mobile phone is the only connection with the outside world. He sends and receives messages, and watches videos from the day before. Both he and his friend Kiwi don’t remember anything from the day before, and together they try to find out what happened and why they feel so miserable. Meanwhile, something seems to be happening outside the Dixie. Sounds change, he starts to move and suddenly the whole cabin flies upside down.​
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You could say that the entire film is set in the Dixie, with Flament in the lead role. However, through flashbacks and what appears to be hallucinations, we sometimes leave the terrain.​ In that sense, ‘Out of the Blue, Into the Black’ is reminiscent of ‘127 Hours’, in which a climber gets stuck between two rocks and reflects on his life. The raunchy Dixie gives way to poetic, dreamy images of a world that you can only enter when you are dying. Will someone find him in time? In addition to these poetic images, sick memories of the day before also surface. Did they really happen or are they nightmares?​
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A lot happens in a short amount of time, which makes it feel patchy. Images fly through each other, making the viewer a bit lost.​ The flashbacks from the night before – in which Flament does weird things with his friend Kiwi and a wild girl named Polly – don’t seem to offer any necessity. required? Or does it say something about the general rashness of young people of that age?​
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All in all ‘Out of the Blue, Into the Black’ is quite well put together, although it lacks a certain structure. ​Perhaps certain details could have been left out and the basics would have been sufficient.​