Student Film of the Week: White Lies

Writers are often told, “Write what you know.” That can be difficult when you’re still a college student and haven’t had much life experience. Actually, some of the best writers haven’t experienced anything close to what they write about. But when a story comes around that’s as genuine as Jessica Dito and Frank Sun’s White Lies, you know that it’s key themes and ideas are woven somehow into the fabric of their experience.

White Lies is about a grown woman thinking back to the lies her mother told her to protect her from the harsh realities of the world. There was Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy. Then there was the lie that her cat Gus had just “gone away for awhile” to a “nice place.” Finally, though, when her serviceman father is killed, there’s no way to shield her from reality any longer. But understanding now what her mother was trying to do, that she was trying to preserve for her daughter the innocence of childhood, makes her appreciate her mother’s love for her all the more. “I forgave my mother, and I hope someday my daughter will forgive me too.”

Whether or not the actual events of this film occurred in the lives of Sun or Dito is less important than their grasping at universal truths. Everybody’s parents lie to them at some point, not out of malicious deceit but from benevolence, from the knowledge that falsehoods can be easier to take at a young age than harsh reality. That Sun and Dito have made a film about universal truths that is also so attuned to nuances of the human experience, shows a master’s ability to capture both the universal and the personal, the general and the specific.

What could have been a pedantic film about “making a point” becomes much more interesting because of the personal nature of what happens on screen. The film starts off with the little girl staring out of her car window, then cutting to close-ups of her late father’s flag, her mother’s wedding ring, and her mother looking in the rear-view mirror to check on how her daughter is doing. It was a smart choice not to let the voiceover narration play too large of a role in the film, but rather use it just to set up the basic ideas. Instead, setting up the relationships between the characters and what they are doing through the visuals is a much more effective choice. Right away, we know that someone close to the little girl (probably her father) has died in combat because she is holding the flag, and that it’s her mother driving the car because of the concern she shows looking back at her daughter through the mirror.

Sun and Dito handle the montage of moments where her mother lies to her extremely well. When the narrator mentions Santa Claus, a left-to-right tracking shot surveys the scene of Christmas morning then smoothly dissolves into another tracking shot of the girl discovering that the Tooth Fairy left her money before dissolving to yet another shot of the mother’s face obscured in shadow, with only her eyes illuminated by a key spotlight. That one shot of her mother covered in shadow but for her eyes, conveys such longing and hope for her daughter that she will never have to know pain or despair, but understanding that sadness is inevitable and a part of the human experience.

While all-too-many student filmmakers are merely making genre parodies full of inside-jokes for their friends, how refreshing it is to see a student film break out of merely the student experience and grasp at a greater humanity. White Lies isn’t just a great student film, it’s a great film.