Bobby Bala is an emerging director with a strong background in Visual FX and 3-D animation. As a father of two daughters, he was inspired to create a relatable human story about family and sacrifice.

As the Bard says, brevity is the soul of wit, and writer/director Bobby Bala certainly has his wits about him with his brief but captivating featurette, The Shipment (2018), full of heart, a couple cool characters, and a thoughtful moral struggle for the hero. The Shipment is part of the lineup of short movies for the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival, showcasing independent films Wed, Apr 24, 2019 – Sun, May 5, 2019. The Shipment centers around a father daughter-relationship suspended in time and space and is among many sci-fi entries featured in the TFF 2019 season.

In addition to navigating the wilds of intergalactic travel in a clunker of a cargo ship, Kaidan Katar (Aleks Paunovi) is also tasked with navigating the hardships of fatherhood as a single parent to his daughter, Zohra (Ishana Bala). The spitting image of her tragically passed mother, Zohra dreams of attending the elite academy, Mimas, as she pensively watches the stars pass her while aboard their cargo ship. With the vessel on its last leg, Kaidan is forced to land at a space-dock to begin asking around for buyers of his ailing vessel. One potential buyer asks Kaidan why he wishes to sell it, and we learn that Kaidan also grew up on a cargo ship and does not want his daughter “growing up like a cargo rat, like me”. After Kaidan is low-balled on pricing at every turn, he is visited by Etienne (Omari Newton), the scrupulous harbormaster, who has learned of Kaidan’s eagerness to sell, but instead poses a different offer – run a shipment for his mysterious “client” who will pay for the ship’s repairs in order to get the job done. The catch? The shipment is enslaved aliens, a trade which is illegal. At the behest of his sweet daughter and his own intuition, Kaidan initially turns down the despicable offer, however, plagued by his addictions and the pressures of single fatherhood, Kaidan decides to take the money and do the run. Accompanied by Etienne’s brutish watchdog Rotik (Robert Maillet), who is tasked with protecting the mysterious client’s unsavory interests, they set out on the mission, though their immoral and illegal deeds will not go unchecked by the universe.

After watching the trailer for this intergalactic trip, I was sure this was going to be a cheesy, hot mess, and not in a good way. I had assumed the effects would be laughable, the acting overdramatic, and it looked like a fan-made trailer quite honestly, so I had low hopes. I was soon proven wrong by Bobby Bala’s keen eye for visual aesthetic and framing, as the opening sequence conveys the beautiful ache of Zohra’s lonely existence as an adolescent child in space in a way that pulled me in. Overall, I felt Bala was going for a “Star Wars prequel-trilogies” look, especially with the Alien designs and their seemingly real linguistics. In fact, Bala’s Alien language is some of the first lengthy dialogue we get in the film, as he uses mostly graphics and sound to carry the movie for nearly 6 minutes of the only 27-minute movie. The score turned out to be a good mood setter and played well against the cosmic setting, reminding me of another sci-fi movie with a silent but loud score, Alfonso Cuarón’s outer-space stunner, Gravity (2013).

The Shipment is probably one of the most well-rounded shorts I have seen in quite a while – I had no questions left unanswered afterward, and I felt I got to know and care about each character just enough in that short time span to feel like I took a complete ride with them. Is it adventurous? No, it is more so a space drama than a thrilling space odyssey – but drama has its place in space too. Every performance was believable and earnest, and I was particularly drawn to Omari Newton’s Etienne character, played as a shadowy figure in a smartly cut trench, finished off with a raspy voice and an affected diction that made the character merit feature length time.

In the midst of making its film circuit rounds, The Shipment has, so far, won ‘Best International Film’ and ‘Best Production Design’ at the 2018 Los Angeles Movie Awards, “Best VFX” at the 2018 Berlin Sci-fi Filmfest, and we shall see if it picks up yet more awards at the Tribeca Film Festival. This short has surprisingly good visual effects and believable relationships that make it easy to watch; a full-length version of this film would be unnecessary as Bala perfectly encapsulates this world and trims the narrative down to its leanest parts, making this short a healthy choice for movie consumers. Bobby Bala’s $1M directorial debut, The Shipment, will be playing:

SAT 4/27 9:00 PM Regal Cinemas Battery Park
TUE 4/30 8:45 PM Regal Cinemas Battery Park
FRI 5/3 5:45 PM Village East Cinema
SAT 5/4 11:00 PM Village East Cinema