Darol Olu Kae expands upon his lyrical style of filmmaking with a new short inspired by his mother’s memories of her brother, who died of AIDS-related complications when Kae was young. Presented online for the first time, Blur offers a stirring portrait of love and loss.
As in his previous shorts — i ran from it and was still in it and Keeping Time — Kae creates a kaleidoscopic montage that refracts and represents momentous episodes in its characters’ lives. This emotional editing sees Kae push against narrative conventions and lean into experimentation to capture memory as it unravels. What unfolds is a stream of moments, alternating between those that evoke overwhelming pain and others that show profound love.
“Blur grew out of my mother’s oral histories about her brother, and I approached it as a way to translate caregiving into cinema, where love is felt through presence, touch, and duration rather than dialogue. Visually, the film stretches small moments into lush, tactile spaces, allowing memory to drift between past and present until they become inseparable.” DAROL OLU KAE
Among Blur’s most affecting qualities is its intense hapticity. Kae resolves to make the viewer feel each scene, making expert use of extreme close-ups and textured lighting to immerse the audience in his film’s proceedings. That degree of closeness, in addition to bringing the viewer in, also reflects Kae’s own proximity to the story being told — one that, for all the time that has passed, remains prescient and palpable.
Darol Olu Kae is an LA-based filmmaker whose work deals with black life in the United States. In 2020, he was awarded the Pardino d’oro for Best International Short Film at the Locarno Film Festival. Since then, his work has accrued more festival awards and screened at prestigious institutions such as the Museum of Modern art and MoCA Los Angeles. He is now working on a feature film titled Without a Song with Arthur Jafa’s production company SunHaus.
Text written by Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer. Special thanks to Darol Olu Kae.