be like us (TRAILER)

29 seconds
trailer for short film

A quiet, Tarkovsky-esque meditation on war’s annihilation of children, ‘Be Like Us’ follows a Ukrainian boy through a surreal, fable-like quest.

After a bomb blast, the seven-year-old tries to repair a broken toy with artefacts of his global siblings: the young and innocent of conflicts in Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Somalia. Though the child succeeds his mission in the end, he is so destroyed — bodily, mentally, spiritually, generationally — his final act is one of a small, but foreboding … murderous violence.

“In four thousand years humanity has learnt nothing at all.”

― Andrei Tarkovsky

NB: I purposefully do not include the extreme suffering of the children of Gaza in the film, as they are in front of mind (at present, and for some time to come), and so act as an underlying foundation/analog for the viewer’s attention to the world’s other children living in unimaginable hell.

CREDITS

writer/director/editor ST JOHN MCKAY

actor MÁTÉ BENJAMIN COOK

camera MÁRTON OBERCZIÁN

narrator OLGA MAY

sound SJ SMITH

assistant IAN COOK

music AUDIOALIAS