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Captured by the Los Angeles-based filmmakers Liv Layhee and Caydon LiRocchi during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Beautiful! (2020) follows the young couple as they face a potential unplanned pregnancy. Shot on VHS, the grainy home video aesthetic adds an intimate layer to the proceedings as the two take turns filming while they await life-altering news. The resulting short is distinctive in style and endearing in its honesty, capturing the drama that inherently accompanies such a pivotal moment, as well as the mix of humour, creativity and numerous cats that makes their relationship idiosyncratic.
Directors: Liv Layhee, Caydon LiRocchi
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Sports and games
Havana’s streets become racetracks in this exhilarating portrait of children at play
5 minutes
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Spirituality
Through rituals of prayer, a monk cultivates a quietly radical concept of freedom
4 minutes
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Language and linguistics
Why Susan listens to recordings of herself speaking a language she no longer remembers
5 minutes
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Home
How an artist transformed a dilapidated hunting lodge into a house made of dreams
8 minutes
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Family life
The migrants missing in Mexico, and the mothers who won’t stop searching for them
21 minutes
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Virtues and vices
Why Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith were divided on the virtues of vanity
5 minutes
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Family life
One family’s harrowing escape from postwar Vietnam, told in a poignant metaphor
10 minutes
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War and peace
A frontline soldier’s moving account of the fabled ‘Christmas truce’ of 1914
12 minutes
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Bioethics
What a 1970 experiment reveals about the possibility and perils of ‘head transplants’
6 minutes