Over the years, NQV Media’s Upon Her Lips series of short-film collections has offered us some truly world-class films exploring life, love, sexuality, and coming of age through a female lens. Upon Her Lips: Kiss Me is the eleventh collection in the series, and while not the strongest we have seen, NQV continues to champion short female-led stories in a way no other media company does.
Upon her Lips: Kiss Me explores the knotty emotions, actions, and feelings associated with love, from the challenges and pain inherent in a break-up to the heat of a first spark of love and lust, or the unresolved love of an ex-partner that continues to haunt the present. From the United States of America to Poland and Hungary, the Kiss Me collection won’t rock your world like some previous NQV releases. Still, it remains a thoughtful and eclectic mix of short stories that deserve your attention and time.
Opening the collection is HOW TO SAY GOODBYE , directed by Thibaut Buccellato. Love isn’t always eternal, and sometimes relationships that were once the centre of our world crumble before our eyes, leading us to that fateful, painful moment when we say goodbye. Following their break-up months earlier, Mia has finally returned to her ex-girlfriend’s apartment to collect the possessions she left behind; it’s a moment she has put off for a while, knowing it marks the end. Thibaut Buccellato beautifully explores the pain of any separation, even when it has been mutually agreed upon, in a short film about the final encounters that must take place before life moves on.
How to Say Goodbye
Next up is DIFFERENT SHORES, directed by Shani Cohen. Talking openly to a parent can be challenging, especially when you are young and gay. For the majority of LGBTQ+ people, the moment you ‘come out’ to your parents is forever bookmarked in your memory, no matter how many years or decades ago it was. In Different Shores, a trip to the Dead Sea finds a young woman, tired of hiding, revealing her secret to a mother with whom she has a close yet complex relationship; but how will the mother react, and is this an end or a new beginning? Shani Cohen’s short coming-out drama asks us to reflect on the closeness of mother-daughter relationships and the turbulence and complexity that surround them during a woman’s teens and early twenties.
Bringing us the delightful summer colours and hormonal heat of movies like Call Me By Your Name, HALF AN ORANGE, directed by Loukia Hadjiyianni, is a sunlit story of newfound desire. On a farm in Cyprus where the fruits ripen as the sun beats down, we meet Valeria, a reclusive and quiet writer, focused on her work rather than love. But when Valeria meets Antigone, an unexpected newfound desire suddenly throws her life off balance and shines a light on everything she has been missing.
Speaking about her sundrenched short film, Loukia Hadjiyianni said, “Half an Orange was inspired by my experience of growing up in Cyprus as a queer woman and by the absence of lesbian films in Cypriot cinema…
There is a certain kind of love that comes into your life, and even though you know it’s not there to stay, knowing doesn’t make it hurt any less. It doesn’t carry less weight or meaning despite its transitory nature. I wanted to explore those feelings and the ways in which we remember people after they’re gone. I’m in love with Cyprus, its landscapes, the sea, and the way light enters through a window and falls onto everything. It was important to me to make this film in Famagusta, a beautiful but conservative area where I grew up. I wanted to take control of the narratives I grew up with and tell a different kind of story, which is how I decided to write Half an Orange”.
Comme Des Cowboys
The penultimate film in Upon Her Lips: Kiss Me is COMME DES COWBOYS, directed by Julia Sadowska. First love is intoxicating, and it never leaves us, no matter how old we may become. Even if that love was complicated, painful or uncertain, the memories, heat and emotions often carry a rose-tinted edge, one that invites us to revisit them again and again. Julia Sadowska’s film asks whether it is ever wise to return to this love years later, as a stud farm becomes a place where memory, love, lust, and infatuation combine.
Finally, closing Upon Her Lips: Kiss Me is LIGHT UP (Kiáltás), directed by Elissa de Brito. Desire and love often know no boundaries. Yet, as humans, we delight in constructing barriers between us, and it can take a while for these to show. Elissa de Brito’s love story is about the barriers that separate, barriers we have chosen to erect or accepted without question due to politics and/or identity. Sometimes, not even love and lust are enough to break down the walls between us in an ever-more-divided and segregated world.
Rent or buy Upon Her Lips: Kiss Me now on Prime Video and Payhip Worldwide.
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