Name: Aurora
Director: Angad Aulakh
Genre: Science fiction, Drama, Short film
Duration: 15 min
Cast: Guy Kent, Jennalyn Ponraj, Robert Diago DoQui, Ethan Daniel Corbett

Angad Aulakh keeps sending his men a long way from home. His feature debut, Autumn Lights, watched a foreigner try to read the morals of a strange land in Iceland. With AURORA, the American filmmaker and his longtime producing partner, actor Guy Kent, push that estrangement as far as it will go: to the farthest reaches of space, where the sole survivor of a catastrophe has nothing left to measure himself against except the void, and whatever answers back from it.

It is a short film, roughly a quarter of an hour long. Kent plays Commander Freddie Ballard, an astronaut stranded after a catastrophic accident who, as isolation gives way to revelation, encounters a mysterious presence that unsettles everything he believes about life, death and what lies beyond. Survival is the premise, not the subject. The film “was never really about whether Freddie could repair something and get back to Earth,” Aulakh told NetflixJunkie in an interview around its premiere; what interested him “much more was the idea of rebirth.”

A scarred face emerging from darkness in the black-and-white sci-fi short AURORA — Image: Last Carnival LLC

The form follows that idea. The stills Last Carnival has released are in black and white, faces carved out of darkness by hard slats of light. According to Film Carnage’s review, the imagery, shot by cinematographer Charlie Wuppermann with production design by Leah Berman, is built entirely through visual effects work, without AI. Aulakh describes wanting Freddie’s reality to become “porous”, with cuts driven by “rhythm and association more than continuity.” He also refuses to explain the force that reaches his astronaut. That is the auteur’s wager in miniature: an unresolved ending, held open on purpose.

The festival circuit has taken notice. After its world premiere at the 22nd HollyShorts Film Festival in August, AURORA has been selected for the 27th Malibu Film Festival, which screens this awards season at the Writers Guild of America Theater in Beverly Hills. At FilmQuest in Provo, Utah, which runs from 22 to 31 October, it is nominated for Best Sci-Fi Short and Best Visual Effects. Next week it competes for the Delta Award for Best Sci-Fi Short at the Festival of Fantastic Films in the UK, and it is also set for the 8th Anomaly Film Festival in Rochester and the Toronto Arthouse Film Festival.

An astronaut in a flight suit with a Ballard name patch, lit through a grille, in AURORA — Image: Last Carnival LLC

Aulakh, an alum of Ryan Murphy Television’s HALF Initiative, and Kent arrive with a record. Their previous films together, the Oscar-qualified The Atomic Dream and the Oscar- and BAFTA-qualified Resurrektor, have collected 33 festival awards and 49 nominations between them, according to the release, and The Atomic Dream reached North American theaters through Filmocracy and iGems. AURORA also stars Jennalyn Ponraj, Robert Diago DoQui and Ethan Daniel Corbett.

The early critical quotes gathered by the production lean on the images. Steve Kopian of Unseen Films wrote that it “has images that surpass the vast majority of what Hollywood has turned out in the last decade.” Its makers have said the film ends without a resolution. Its festival run, for now, keeps adding new chapters.

Tags: Angad Aulakh, Aurora (short film), FilmQuest, Guy Kent, HollyShorts Film Festival, Last Carnival