Dan Simeone on Chasing the Past

Jonathan Salemi’s new 17-minute short film, Chasing the Past, was screened on April 14th at this year’s Boston International Film Festival and won Best Cinematography for short films. This is Salemi’s second film in the festival and second award. In 2010, Salemi’s short Sidewalk Symphony won the Indie Soul Special Recognition Award.

Chasing the Past is more dramatic than Sidewalk Symphony. A distraught man (Adam Marcinowski), whose fiancé (Ceri Bethan) passed away, discovers a female self-proclaimed time traveler (Alycia Grant) in the desert. Both actors deliver notably compelling performances. I wouldn’t want to give anything away, but when I spoke to Salemi about the film; he said the ending was influenced by the German film Faust (1926). It took seven days to film and he spent a year in postproduction.

Time travel is very difficult to approach when telling stories. Traditionally I find that filmmakers choose one of two ways to approach this element; some attempt to get very technical, giving logic or reason to the time travel, as in Donnie Darko (2001), and others try to convey time travel as an accepted fact and move on, as in Terminator (1984). I liked Donnie Darko, but I prefer not to dwell on the logistics of time travel unless it’s the heart of the movie. In this case, it was not, and I like that Salemi did not dive in and try to justify it or get into the details. Doing so could take away from the effect of the story.     Overall Chasing the Past is one of the better short films I have seen in a while. If you get a chance, see it. Between the award-winning cinematography, by Josh Fritts and the exciting, unpredictable plot ending, it is worth the watch.

Jonathan Salemi is from Revere, Massachusetts. Some of his other films have been broadcast on PBS and DirectTV. Chasing the Past will screen at the New Jersey International Film Festival on May 30th, 2014.